This site was inspired by my own recent suspension, after doing nothing wrong . Even E-Bay won’t tell me anything directly, only the following garbage is pasted into every mail:

Your account was suspended from eBay due to the violation of our
Unwelcome Buying ? Intent to Disrupt policy.

Our records indicate that you bid with the primary intent to disrupt a
listing. eBay defines this as bidding on or purchasing an item solely to
disrupt the seller’s listing, with no intention of completing the
transaction.

In order to continue with your appeal, you’ll need to fulfill two simple
requirements.

1. Understand the reasons for which your account was suspended.

Let’s stop there for a moment:

• In order to be an “unwanted buyer”, stipuations have to be set forth, for the transaction, by the seller. Of course, there were none.
• There is no such thing as an ‘unwanted buyer’ on E-Bay, seriously. Each seller may cancel a bid on an item, at their own discretion. SOOOO, the ‘unwanted buyer’ bullshit is incorrect

Now, let’s get to “Intent to disrupt”

• The item was purchased
• The item was paid for
• Feedback was left

Can anyone ELSE explain to me how this is ‘intentionally disrupting’ the transaction? Am I missing a step? Am I not allowed to leave appropriate feedback? Maybe I’m not allowed to buy the item in question? Maybe I’m not supposed to do anything once the auction has ended? No, see, THAT would be disrupting the auction itself, as this person already did to me!

So, I understand perfectly what the rules are, how to ‘intentionally disrupt’ an auction, or a transaction. Did I? Absolutely NOT.

Now, we’re left with me having to ‘understand why my account was suspended’. Like  a little kid, I’m put on ‘timeout’ to think about what I’ve done “wrong”, but guess what? E-Bay refuses to TELL me what I’ve done wrong, only gives some vague bullshit reference to terms which I clearly have not violated.

SO, in order to get my account back, I have to ‘understand why my account was suspended’. Can it be done? Not at all, because I BROKE NO RULES! Seriously, folks, I broke absolutely ZERO rules. I paid for the item, I won the item, the seller did not CANCEL the sale, I left appropriate feedback for ALL transactions (negative, of course, because the seller was also a NPB).

According to EBay’s definition:

eBay defines this as bidding on or purchasing an item solely to
disrupt the seller’s listing, with no intention of completing the
transaction.

I am NOT breaking any rules whatsoever, here. The transaction WAS completed, 100% BEFORE the suspension was placed. Go figure

Is it just me, or is this place going to hell faster than anything. Can anyone who has SUCCESSFULLY appealed this trash tell me what’s going on here? I’d love alternatives, but damnit, there appear to be no valid ones out there.

Being a (sometime) seller, primarily a buyer, I have to say that I’m not as affected as say, a full time seller. I only sell shit when it’s no longer useful to me. What’s scary though is the assinine level of idiocy seen from Ebay support and staff at this point though. Take the following scenario (based off of my own personal experience)

When a buyer “purchases” something on e-bay, they no longer have to pay for it. Really, we can say ” I was hacked”, “I was on vacation”, “I wasn’t here”, etc, and, you know what? That’s ALL that is needed. Ebay will side with he buyer.

The SELLER then is left with no recourse, except to purchase something from the buyer, and try to leave appropriate feedback (for all transactions) that way.

Unfortunately, E-Bay is now calling THAT an “unwanted buy”, however, and closing down accounts (my own specifically) because of this. Despite the faact that the feedback is related to the transaction, the fraudulent buyer can simply say “That is an unwanted buy”, never ship the item (mine never did), never do anything at all, and then never, ever do anything. Ebay will suspend the person who was burned (the seller in this case), with absolutely zero recourse.

This is one of the most annoying and upsetting adventures I’ve been on in 10+ years online. I’m a straightforward guy (albeit a bit of an ass when I don’t get what I pay for), but this is just outrageous.

Never before have I seen the customer forced to take shit from a company like this, ever.

Of course, those are just my two cents on the matter. I’m curious to see what the rest of you think about it. Please, feel free to leave comments!

NEVER purchase anything from these guys, otherwise you’ll be put onto their mailing list because they want to sell you MORE. Errm, what? I never ONCE suggested that you could give my personal email address for spam. Of course, ebay won’t do anything here, but what the hell, right? Stay away from these guys, bad bad bad transactions will ensue if you pursue them.

I’ve tried emailing E-Bay about this. Their response? We don’t care. Quite seriously, they just flat out don’t care about spam, or people trying to put you on their private mailing list. This is EXACTLY why you NEVER, EVER give your information out to anyone you don’t have to (including sources such as auctiva).

Paypal handles EVERYTHING from shipping labels to shipping to anything else, and is quite reasonable with the pricing. There is absolutely NO EXCUSE for a seller to require registration on a third party site such as auctiva and the other related stuff.

The auction: I won an auction for 2 MTGO cards. No worries there, right? I win these things all the time, and pay immediately. I even won using BIN, at the SELLER’S price!!!
The problem: The auction (for two cards) was less than a buck. Yay, no worries there. Unfortunately, the seller is, in fact charged almost .40 by paypal. Well, this isn’t my concern at all, and shouldn’t be passed on to the end customer AFTER the fact.

This guy’s solution?
He demands that customers pay a minimum of $5 to paypal, meaning that the individuals MUST purchase $5 worth of cards from him in order to pay via paypal. If this isn’t done, and the customer actually PAYS (gasp) via paypal, the individual demands an .80 extra fee. This is absolutely and totally horseshit!

Update - June 23, 2006:
I received an email from E-Bay, stating they shut the auction down. At least they’re trying to clean the place up, a bit too late though. More on the way as they come in.

This company tried to file with ebay as a NPB, but, since I’ve been a member for a good while, and have NEVER had a NPB filing successfully placed, well, it was reversed. So, they try damaging my ebay “credit” by saying I refused to pay. True story, enjoy the emails! You can see my response to their “NPB” stuff here, obviously I was cleared of any “wrongdoing” because the seller refused to supply a very simple paypal link. Again, submitting private information to third party people is BAD. That’s WHY paypal exists, they can take ALL the info they need from there, even print a damn shipping label. talk about your fraudster company. Enjoy the publicity market2market, cuz it’s all going downhill, dumbass.

Author’s Note:
Originally, this was filed in ‘04 on my own website, and the emails were included with this. However, I have removed the emails from this article. The fact remains though, selling and requiring registration using auctiva, or any other website is just wrong and unnecessary.

A> Charging users more than what they agreed to pay.
B> Forcing users to buy a product elsewhere, rather than on E-Bay
C> Misleading E-Bay users

Of course, they refused to provide the product for 0.01, and I, of course, refused to pay THEM $189. Funny thing is, I picked the SAME phone up for the exact same price ($189) elsewhere. I just refuse to pay THEM $189, as they are nothing but a bunch of frauds, ripoffs, and thieves. They operate a cell site as well (gomywireless dot com), make sure you don’t do business THERE either! Definite fraud!

I’ve been an e-bay user for going on 8 years now. Since early 01, I’ve been doing things off an on through E-Bay. I don’t make a huge profit from it, in fact, helll, I use it to buy small stuff usually, get collections going again.

Typically, I login to e-bay a few times a year, make a collective set of purchases, log back out and forget it exists. I make payment instantly, and leave appropriate feedback. I’m a seller’s DREAM, if you play by the rules. By playing by the rules, I mean the following:

1. ship on time ( < 24 hours)
2. test the product to make sure it works (duuh)
3. fully disclose any problems (manuals missing, no matching case, etc)
4. provide paypal links where asked, not 3rdparty spamhaus links (all auction programs are spam and will send you unsolicited mail)
5. avoid sending spam to users

If you DON’T play by the rules of common sense, well, you don’t want to be doing business with me. I’m fairly reasonable, I’ll allow up to 2 weeks for intl. shipping, but 1 week is all you get for local. Being in the midwest, it does NOT take longer than 1 week for ANY package shipped from ANYWHERE to get here. Typically, it’s 2-3 days.

As you can see by looking at my profile, I have a reasonably good feedback rating. I say reasonably good, because numerous individuals have provided ‘retaliatory’ negative feedback, because they didn’t like the fact that THEY had negatives left for them. I’m fairly decent, a good E-Bayer, no strikes that were undeserved ( a couple because people refused to provide direct paypal links, but they were always reversed ) . So, why the warning? Well here goes.

Recently, E-Bay changed it’s policy for sellers. Now, sellers can NOT leave any sort of ‘negative’ feedback for buyers whatsoever. That both HURTS and HELPS. Here’s why:

This helps, because now buyers can (kind of) feel free to leave appropriate feedback. No retaliation from sellers, no worries about a seller trashing your reputation. Hey, it’s a good thing in that respect.

This also HURTS sellers, because now buyers can do what the hell ever they please. They have been given carte blanche by E-Bay to do anything and everything. Let’s say you bid $500 on an item and don’t want to pay for it. Don’t. Really, you don’t have to! In fact, hell, when the seller opens up a “non paying bidder” argument, well, hey, just tell E-Bay you were “hacked”, you were “on vacation”, you were somewhere else, and the item was re-listed. The item strike will be removed, and guess what? YOU get to leave NEGATIVE FEEDBACK for the seller!!!

I say this from personal experience. E-Bay pulled this one on me. Here’s how it went!

Item A went up for sale. Originally it was a BIN of 850, minimum of 500. I had no interest so I took it down for a few days.

When I relisted Item A, I put the BIN at 450, minimum at 300. That spaarked a good bit of interest, and sold for $395.

Now, since the auction ended on Monday, and I was leaving the following Tuesday (a week later) for vacation, it was important for me to get information , payment, and get this thing on the road to the buyer inside of a week. No worries, I send the “buyer” an “invoice” using e-bay, and informed her to ONLY contact me through E-Bay, to prevent the spam traps from catching this thing. Good advice, right?

Well , Tuesday morning came and went. No response. I again send her a message (through e-bay), and tell her that it needs to be taken care of, or she needs to respond to the message within 24 hours. STILL no response.

Wednesday came, I told her she had 24 hours to respond or pay, or it would be re-listed, and she’d have action taken against her. As expected, still no response.

Now we’re on crunch time here. I have a package on my table of 100+ games (ps2) needing to be shipped and paid for. I send a second chance offfer, adding more fees to the account, to not get a purchase. No worries, the individual wasn’t obligated to respond.

Friday, I re-list the item again (this is the 3rd re-list, imagine the fees going into paypal/e-bay right now), blocking the fraudulent buyer , and get it sold. It sells for about $20 more than the original, but that’s neither here nor there. Buyer pays within 36 hours, and I’m good to go.

Now, the ORIGINAL (fraudulent) buyer has been active for a week, or better now, winning auctions, leaving feedback, receiving feedback. It’s clear they’re them, just because the feedback left matches their previous feedback, and it’s a damn mess, seriously. They’ve listed items in that week, and done everything account related, so I KNOW they were there, on their own account.

Since they’ve listed items, I bid on a couple of the cheap ones. I pay around $6 including shipping for two “toys”, with the intention of leaving appropriate feedback for all transactions (including the one the buyer ripped me out of).

I LEAVE said feedback, and within 24 hours, i get notice from E-Bay that my account is suspended, because (and I kid you not, here’s the reason) I was an

Unwelcome Buyer- Intent to Disrupt a Listing

Well, that was the ORIGINAL buyer, not me, but ok, fine. I email E-bay about this misunderstanding, and their words (I shit you not people):

Your account was suspended for a minimum of 3 days for violation of the
following policy:
Unwelcome and Malicious Buying - Bidding on or purchasing an item with
the primary intent of disrupting the listing, with no intention of
completing the transaction.

Wait, wait, WHAT?
I WON the item
I PAID for the item (unlike the original fraudulent buyer, who DID intend to disrupt the listing)
I left appropriate feedback for ALL transactions (negative of course, because she was a fraudulent buyer)
E-Bay suspends MY account ( a good account after almost 8 years) because of this idiot’s whining about getting PROPER FEEDBACK?

This too, can happen to you folks. Be very, very careful when dealing with the crooks that are E-Bay!