I'm running into an issue where someone is creating ebay accounts and sending me messages that have an image attached to them. I suspect the attached image is clickbait and contains some type of browser exploit/virus etc. It is very annoying and I don't have any way to block these so I called up ebay customer support to complain (I actually have called them three times in the past week). They were extremely unhelpful. Here are some of the things they said.....
#1 They would close the offending account.
This doesn't do much of anything since this person keeps creating new accounts and keeps sending me spam messages.
#2 I should block the user.
Did they think I hadn't tried this??? Either way it's a dumb suggestion, because all they have to do is create a new account and keep sending me messages. I'll be stuck in this perpetual game of blocking every new account they create.
#3 The messages will stop in a few days because it takes their technicians that long to block the account.
I sensed this was bull**bleep** but I decided to wait it out. That was five days ago. The messages have NOT stopped. They just kept creating a new ebay account and sending me new ones. I just got a new one from yet another one of their accounts this morning.
#4 Their IP is blocked so the messages will stop.
Another dumb assertion. Anyone can circumvent this easily by getting a new IP address. Seriously, have these techs ever heard of a VPN service? Also, the messages haven't stopped.
#5 I could file a lawsuit against the user for harrasing behavior.
Probably the dumbest thing that any tech has said to me yet. Do they actually think I'm going to be able to track this person down and sue them? Do they realize that this is practically impossible? Or the amount of time and money something even attempting something like this would cost?
Is anyone here was facing this problem? All the accounts this spammer creates seem to be coming from the Ukraine and the messages all have a similar format, they used commas or semicolon or some other punctuation character instead of spaces. This;sentence/is/an*example.of.what.their.messages.look:like.__They.never.use#spaces.just.punctuation.characters. Ebay does not seem to have any automatic spam filtering, have any mailbox filtering whatsoever, have any useful way to stop this person from spamming me, or offer me the ability to apply custom rules to my messages so that I can ignore these. In fact, ebay seems powerless to stop this person from spamming me. Any suggestions short of leaving ebay forever for Craigslist, Facebook marketplace, or Amazon? How can ebay have no ability to stop users from spamming other users?
