eBay Suspension — The saga continues!

As you may or may not know, my eBay account was sus­pended over 1 1/2 months ago for the vague rea­son of being “asso­ci­ated with a pre­vi­ously sus­pended user”. I was given that users name, and that is it. This user hadn’t used his account in 5 years, and so I thought it was strange that some­how I (and my mom, and my dad) were ran­domly selected to have their accounts sus­pended. Here is an update of my strug­gle to get my account reinstated.

The first steps I took were, of course, to reply to accu­sa­tions and dis­pute them. I was sent a form let­ter say­ing I should reply to the form let­ter and restate my dis­putes and they may or may not reply, depend­ing on whether they think my argu­ments are good enough or not. So I responded to the form let­ter. I then received another form let­ter telling me to fill out a form and fax/mail it in to eBay’s INV Appeals. I quickly did this, spend­ing some money and some gas to get the fax out quickly, and then waited for the reply.

And waited.

And waited.

It has now been nearly a month since I sent in the fax, and still no reply. So today I decided to be a lit­tle more proactive.

I found eBay’s 1–888 num­ber and gave them a call. I was promptly told to hang up the phone, and go use their online cus­tomer ser­vice. Jeesh. Retarded.

So I go and use their live help, and select the topic clos­est to “my account was sus­pended for no good rea­son and I want it back but you are drag­ging your feet”, which hap­pened to be “Other”.

And I waited.

Finally “Benie T.” came on to help me with my prob­lem. I was directed to a con­tact form. The page came up 404. Hmm. Thats use­ful. So he gave me another link which actu­ally did lead me to a con­tact form. I was promised I would receive an actual response and not a form let­ter. I highly doubt that I will, but we’ll see.

What makes this all even worse is that eBay has $14 of my dol­lars sit­ting in my account that I can’t spend or with­drawal. After about 45 min­utes of being bounced around cus­tomer ser­vice some­one finally directed me to the request a refund page, which says it may take up to a month before they get around to send­ing me my money. Jeesh. Freak­ing monop­o­lis­tic eBay.

As if it isn’t bad enough that 90% of the items on eBay are spam that bla­tantly vio­late eBay polocies (search for “runescape”), but to top it off they can sus­pend you for any rea­son or no rea­son, and take no effort on their part to help you get it resolved.

Bot­tom line: I hate eBay.