Howto: Scam eBay and Get Free PC Parts!
Introduction
Greetings, denizens!
I come to you in the time of COVID-19 with a tale of PC upgrade gone horribly awry. Through a rather clever and honestly downright elegant in its dastardlyness setup, plus a bit of naivete on my part: I was ripped off by an eBay con ‘artist’ in a way that has been thus far, impossible for me to rectify — though the feeling is that a solution is on the horizon. This post is written mostly as a stream of consciousness, attempting to ward will-be sellers, and entertain other parties about the scam and my particular mishap. I think this particular sort of scam is going to be on the rise given its effectiveness, and difficulty to undo the damages from.
tl;dr?
If you’re pressed for time and just want to know what to look for, read only the ‘Assumptions’ and ‘The Scam’ sections. No need to bother with my winding tale and the intricate details. You can even skip the ‘Execution’ section of ‘The Scam’ if the high level and what to look for is enough to satisfy you.
Assumptions
I’m in the US, so the details here will be presented from my point of view. Some of the setup of this scam seems to rely on US-specific details, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t an equivalent for your locality. I will do my best to describe why the scammer picks on the specific things they do in order to reveal what might be the similar options in your area.
The Scam
High Level
On the top: It’s a simple reversed-payment scheme. The artist will purchase a product from you, pay, and ask for a cheap shipping option. Months later, the artist will open an “item not received case”, and it will be closed in their favor. You’ll be left holding the bag, confused as to how this happened and out both your part and your cash. You’ll find it seemingly impossible to challenge the case, because your support tickets keep getting routed to Germany, despite neither you nor your buyer being German. The scam banks on the effective firewalls it constructs to throw a wrench into your plans at every corner as you attempt to find the fix. You’ll curse existence, and swear off eBay as a whole, before sadly realizing they’re the only game that matters when it comes to online auctioning. Hopefully you’ll be resolute enough to keep fighting.
What To Look Out For
Skip this section if you don’t want to spoil the story below, and definitely read this if you’re just here for the tl;dr.
- A buyer from a country not yours, where USPS (or similar) package tracking typically does not work.
- A buyer who requests, insists, or in some cases demands that you use a particular shipping service, because if you don’t they would have to pay “more customs duties” or some other excuse.
- A buyer who’s shipping address differs from the “from” on their profile.
- A buyer with any feedback about refusing to pay customs fees or requesting things not in the auction.
- Check ‘Positive’ feedback too — many people will leave bad feedback as ‘positive’ as it’s a requirement before some time has passed.
- As well, some will have initially left positive feedback, but will later append a follow-up that differs greatly from the original feedback!
- A buyer who, when providing their shipping address, includes a large string of digits as part of the address or their name.
The Execution
You’ll list your sweet deal of a part on eBay. The auction is going great, and you have a lot of interest and several bidders! Finally the auction closes and you’ve got a winner! That final closing price is a few bucks higher than you thought you’d get too. The buyer is from another country and quickly sends you a message excited that they won. They’ll tell you how they would like a cheap shipping option to save some money.
Their payment hits, and eBay tells you it’s time to ship. You pack up your processor/videocard/ram/what have you, with the utmost care and seal it all away. You buy the shipping label slap it on the box, and drop it off at the post office and plan your next upgrade with your used part windfall.
Months later, you get an email from eBay saying a case has been opened against you. Your buyer never received the part you shipped! “Work with the buyer to resolve it”, the message from eBay will say: so you’re on the case. You immediately send a message to the buyer asking them to confirm the situation. You fire up the tracking site and check yourself and are dumbfounded: It still shows “in transit”, and it has for months. “This can’t be right,” you think aloud as you frantically google around and start composing an email or hunting for the postal service phone number. The post office can’t help, the service you shipped the package with can’t even be inquired about. You’re panicking.
A few days pass and the buyer never responded to any of the messages you sent. The minimum required time has passed for the buyer to escalate the case to eBay, so they do, still ignoring your messages as they go. In seemingly no time, the case is closed against you, and the money you earned (and maybe already spent!) is sucked out of your account like a noodle from your ramen. You click the support links in the email informing you, and land somehow on the German eBay site? You’re lost, confused, and a little untergegangen.
You get on the phone with eBay support, and they tell you what you can already see on the screen. The case is closed because it shows no tracking updates for months, and the buyer didn’t get the item. You’ve lost.
My Story
So begins a tale of what has lead to near infinite frustration, all in part because I managed to snag a shiny new 5950x at MSRP. I’ve spent over a week now on the phone, emailing, and support chatting with no fewer than 30 different eBay customer support agents. At each turn, I’ve managed to uncover a bit more about the plot described here, convincing effectively every agent of the legitimacy as I’ve gone — with the notable exception of the eBay Germany agents. But that will become apparent as to why they are relevant later.
This will be written in first person, in a way that is hopefully entertaining. Even with my attempts at telling it in a compelling manor, I assure you every single detail in the story is entirely factual. None of the companies spoken about are endorsing this post in any way. Screenshots linked are actual screenshots, with identifying information obfuscated, perhaps annotated in red, but otherwise unedited. I will be cutting down on some of the individual exchanges between eBay representatives and myself, as there have truly been more than I care to list, much less elaborate on the often uselessness of the exchanges.
The Sale
I’d done it. I’d set up a tool to constantly poke at Amazon, Newegg, Antonline, and others to see when the “weapons grade unobtainium” Ryzen 5950x showed up in stock, and I managed to buy it. A short shipping later, It’s slapped in my rig and crushing numbers. Now was the fun part: re-coup as many of the spent dollars as I could by flipping my still-in-high-demand Zen 2 3900X. I check the prices at big-box retailers as well as a few boutique options to see what a new 3900X was going for. I pull up my favorite eBay ‘flip’ tool, to see what prices current listings looked like and what some sales had gone for. Sick! $400 or so. It’s December, so people are certainly buying parts for Christmas. Now was definitely the best time for me to sell — make back some sweet cash, and let someone get a deal on a chip that is hard to find right now.
The listing received almost an instant first bid. Over the auction length, it had tons of interest. Forty someodd watchers, several bidders, and I even had a few messages asking if I shipped overseas. (Which seemed like a funny question, because I had flagged the item to take part in eBay’s “Global Shipping Program”, so… duh?)
The auction closed. $455. I was blown away that I managed to get such a high price when I saw others go for $50 less (or even deeper discounts!) My buyer was from China, and seemed enthusiastic regardless.
The Winner
I didn’t get paid instantly. Instead, the buyer sent me a message. The high price didn’t seem deter their happiness: They won, and wanted me to send them an invoice through eBay. They wanted the cheapest shipping option available, which they already seemed to know was the USPS First Class service. And I mean, who wouldn’t want to save a few bucks on international shipping, right?
I hadn’t even managed to respond to that message before they sent a follow-up message in attempt to clarify. They needed that invoice so that the shipping cost could be added. I send the invoice using the feature baked in to eBay. I’d used it a few times before, but it’s typically for when someone buys several items from you: You can use it to send an invoice so that they can pay for all the items, but only get charged for shipping once. I had never sold to anyone from China before, so thought perhaps this is a step that’s necessary. I sat back and waited, grin on my face.
The next day, I received another message from the buyer. It seemed they had received the invoice and would pay me soon, but wanted to make sure to choose the cheapest shipping option. Which again, they were calling out by name as USPS First Class. They say it’s because if I used another shipping option it would cost them more money on customs duties, which they didn’t want to pay. That seemed reasonable to me at the time, but I would later find out that was the first lie. I replied to let them know, yes, I see USPS First Class as an option on my side.
The Payment
Another day passes. It’s payday. In a flurry of notifications, I’m informed that I’d been paid, the balance was in my PayPal account, and eBay letting me know it’s time to ship! I fire up the website and notice I also have yet another message from my buyer. Wait, make that two messages, sent only 3 minutes apart. The first message appeared to be an attempt to explain their address to me. I didn’t pay much mind to it, as I was just intending to use the eBay label generation anyways. The second message… was about the shipping again. I’m not even sure if I read it or just rolled my eyes that someone could be so concerned about a shipping option. If only I had known. The discerning eye might catch in that message some things that now completely seem out of place: not only the obsession with the shipping service used and the customs duties lie again; In addition to those was the perhaps thinly veiled threat that if another USPS service was used, that they would allow Chinese customs to reject the package entirely.
That should have been my major red flag. Instead, it only seemingly justified to me at the time, the sketchy feedback left in their short feedback profile: Someone had complained that the buyer “indicated she would not be responsible fir any custom fees.” [sic]. The other feedback that worried me at the time was that the buyer was demanding things not offered in the auction, and wouldn’t pay. That didn’t seem to apply to me, as I’d already been paid!
The Shipping
Just because you know this story already has a villain, doesn’t mean that I didn’t attempt to do my due diligence. Even with my attempts to dissuade myself of fears from the odd messages and uncouth feedback, I still felt a tingle in my spine that told me not everything was copacetic. Before I paid for the shipping label, I figured it best to at least speak to someone from eBay and make sure I was on the right track.
I bounce on the eBay chat support and speak with a very kind person called Joseph. I hadn’t even made it into my questions about shipping before Joseph attempted to alleviate some of my concern right off the bat: “I would say this is a good transaction and got nothing to worry” [sic], Joseph would quickly inform me after providing the item number. In case you’ve made it this far and aren’t aware yet: Joseph is wrong, incalculably wrong. I had plenty of reason to worry.
I went on to ask Joseph about the shipping service my buyer was obsessed with. I mentioned I was excited to use the Global Shipping Program, as it was my first go at it, and found the concept thrilling: Mail domestically, but get to ship internationally with none of the hassle. I attempted to clarify with Joseph that I was picking the correct options.
Joseph was eager to see why I wasn’t seeing the option they described, so I sent a screenshot while answering the question about the destination address. Joseph spent a few minutes looking into it, and decided that I did in fact need to use eBay International Standard, as it seemed GSP wasn’t supported in China right now. Shucks, guess using GSP will have to wait.
The last question I had for Joseph was how to fill out customs forms, as I had looked them up and they had fields I wasn’t familiar with. Joseph told me that I could simply put N/A, since I was using eBay International. It seems that eBay International was in fact just USPS First Class — which I had already determined at this point, as I had proceeded in the flow to get to the forms I was filling out. I figured it best not to bug Joseph on that one, and went about my day.
I figured at this point I had one real choice to make: trust Joseph, and ship this chip — or go back on the agreement I made on eBay forever ago where in each auction is a contract to buy/sell. I’d spent nearly a decade and a half building up my 100% positive feedback score. With Joseph’s earlier thumbs up on the transaction, I decided.
That was it! Label printed, CPU packed, lotsa bubble wrap, box sealed, label affixed! It was late in the evening, so I’d drop off the package at the post office first thing in the morning.
The Holiday
I tend to be a bit of a nervous person, so I almost always physically hand my packages to a USPS employee, and get a receipt for doing so. This shipment would certainly not be an exception for me. At this point I breathed a sigh of relief. The tracking number even started with a “U”, just like the buyer absolutely insisted on. I had done everything right, I thought.
I typically track packages of a fair number of the high-value items I’ve sold on eBay, just because I tend to worry. I also usually send messages to buyers if I notice shipments stuck in transit. Stuck in transit has been happening a lot with COVID-19, and the end of year holidays weren’t helping. It only took a day or two, but my package made it to Miami, one of the largest distribution hubs near me. After that though, I saw no updates. Christmas passed, then New Years. I was starting to worry, until January 10th.
Finally, it had moved to Jamaica, New York. I’m familiar with Jamaica — A good number of packages I receive from overseas, particularly those from Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and other Asian localities typically come through there. I breathed a sigh of relief, as I felt like I’d done it. My package made it to an international hub. Should be smooth sailing from here.
The Shock
After the package had made it to NY, I mostly moved on with things. Didn’t bother checking on it, and effectively figured I didn’t need to concern myself with it anymore. That was mostly true, until this month.
Your buyer opened a request. The email’s subject made my heart sink like I just got rejected asking out the girl I had spent months crushing on. Shit, “what did I do now,” I thought while roledexing the most recent things I had sold on eBay in my mind. Please work with your buyer to make it right, the email started. The buyer’s comments: “Still not received” [sic]. What do they want? A refund. They don’t even want the CPU anymore?
“Gosh, I guess I have to re-list it once I find it. I sure hope the prices are good!” My mind was fluttering in the only way my ADHD knows how to let it. I immediately started a mental to-do list of everything I need to check and handle. The email continued on, that I need to respond within a week by providing whatever shipping details I could; That or if I didn’t have tracking information that showed delivery to consider refunding the buyer.
I (e-)sprint to the USPS tracking website pulling the receipt out of the drawer on my desk, clacking in the tracking number hoping to see this is all just a big misunderstanding. What I saw was something I certainly didn’t expect.
The package… hadn’t moved since I last checked on it?! That can’t be right, certainly it had to make it somewhere, was the only thing I could think. This didn’t even look like the many other packages I’ve sent or received: It wasn’t marked lost, nor delayed. There wasn’t even the cute little message saying “It’s still on it’s way, just running late!” that so many packages display in this time of the pandemic.
I’m sure the USPS was going to be ready to help me, they probably see this sort of thing all the time. I head over to the “find missing mail” section of the site, and plop in my tracking number. Have an issue related to this tracking number? the site queries me? Absolutely, I do, exclaimed in some form or another as I slam the “Start” button.
And just as quickly as my search would have started, it stopped. “Inquiries are not accepted for the service purchased to mail this item,” the rudely red text error informed me. Fuck. Well now what? I send off emails to everyone I could think of, trying general queries and hoping for the best. At this point, I felt the right thing to do was to update my buyer.
I sent a message, via the eBay case tool that same day. Then, after I hadn’t heard anything a few days later, sent another follow-up. (Both messages in a single screenshot: here.) My buyer never responded. Radio silence from everyone. I continued to hope for the best, and continued to wait.
The Drop
In a series of events that I can’t even begin to comprehend how quickly or slowly they actually occurred, everything tumbled down. Emails, notifications, text messages, all arriving in flurries: The case was escalated to ebay to make a decision, once again with the buyer’s new but identical comments: “Still not received.” The case was put on hold, with no reason given. Then, what was unimaginable to me happened: the case was closed, decided in the buyers favor.
PayPal immediately reported the nearly-$500 withdrawal, sending my account screaming into the red. Emails from eBay informed me how the decision was made. It spoke to an ability to appeal, but didn’t clarify how to do so. I was at a loss for words, other than those of frustration with other such grunts and moans. I clicked the links in the email informing me of my case loss, only to find myself… on eBay.de? What the heck? Someone’s got a bug in their template!
I start with the chat service, quickly finding it to go nowhere, as it seems though both the agent and I speak English, concepts and comprehension didn’t seem to span the digital borders between us. I fire off support emails at the same time I request a call back to hopefully speak to a human being about this, as clearly there has to be a misunderstanding. I had done everything I was supposed to, I thought. How on earth could I be on the hook for something that was through no fault of my own!
The rep who eventually called, was sympathetic to my issue. I spent a lengthy amount of time telling them what I knew, and how I had got to the point I was in now. As I was doing so, I had pulled up some of the initial messages the buyer sent to me, as I spoke about the oddity of them demanding I use the specific shipping service and threatening to not pay duties if I didn’t (which is, against the eBay Abusive Buyer Policy, I’d later find. As is a buyer lying to a seller, as this one did about the fees.)
Naturally, I clicked on the seller’s profile to try and paint a picture about the odd feedback I had seen before. Only, now there were a few more feedback, and basically none of it sounded good, despite being ‘positive’. At this point there was no doubt in my mind. I got scammed. And I wasn’t the only one.
The CS rep agreed entirely with me. They felt I had been scammed too. They wrote what sounded to be a through explanation appended to the ticket’s internal notes, and sent it away to the appeals department. I held my breath and did what I had done so many times already though this process: waited.
I awoke the next morning to an email I received about 4:30am local time. “Sehr geehrter Herr
Something just didn’t add up for me, and I’m not the kind of person to take no for an answer. It was time to dig.
The Investigation
I’ll spare you the copious amounts of time I’ve spent on the phone with a slew of different reps. It was often some reps from the ‘trust and safety’ department that would prove the most useful in helping me uncover new information as I continued to try and right where things had gone wrong, but many from other departments ended up providing pieces of the puzzle as I went along as well. Every rep I spoke with on the phone (bar one manager,) agreed with my findings, and thought based on the information I had at the time and the more that I’d uncover along the way only made us all more confident in findings.
One rep had me call PayPal with them on the line and discuss what happened there. Despite the rep being uncomfortable with how the transactions were listed on his end, that paid out fruitlessly. They were listed in a way that made him feel like the buyer may have attempted to open a case not only with eBay, but with PayPal as well to try and get “double payback”. However, it seemed PayPal didn’t have any extra information. It was entertaining when the rep told me “you should ask eBay about this”, to which I said “well,
The Tracking
The rep who called PayPal with me also had me call the USPS. He was unable to stay on the line, (as the wait was ~2 hours for a callback at that point,) but I did spend some time speaking to an agent from the international division. This yielded a lot of information about why the buyer was so insistent on USPS First Class.
It turns out that USPS First Class International is “best-effort” tracked. Inside the United States it will be scanned at every stop. However, once the package is handed to the destination courier (say, after leaving Jamaica NY,) there’s absolutely no guarantee tracking info will be reported, unless the destination courier has an agreement with the USPS. What’s your bet on China Post? You got it: no tracking.
This is also the clue as to why the tracking information (still, even today) shows “in transit”, rather than “lost”, “delayed”, or “still on it’s way”. Because it left the international hub, there is no reason for the USPS to mark it as any of those statuses, as it can, and often does still get delivered despite the seemingly abrupt end of the tracking information. This won’t happen with “Registered” or “Priority” packages, as those are required to be scanned and reported by the destination couriers.
But how could they pull this off, I found myself constantly wondering. It was only just recently that I took a closer look back at the mailing address. I hadn’t paid near enough attention to it in the first place, assuming the non-English words and numbers corresponded to a name, plus some sort ability for the buyer to receive the package. I suppose in a way it did; but I did not expect it to in the way I and a senior manager now believe it to be. Plus, I should have noticed that the buyer’s actual name showed up above that line when I printed the label.
The first line of the address was in the form 01#<word> <word> <word> <word>01234567890, where the numbers are seemingly random. Digging into China Post in particular, it seems that their tracking numbers for their equivalent of USPS First Class? Eleven digits, plus ‘CN’. The manager and I searched around to see if anything from that first line was related to any address. The remainder of the address? A hotel. This scammer put a damn tracking number right in front of me (and Joseph,) and we didn’t even see it.
The Rub
Going back to the support conversations: most of the chats I’d have would end with a dead end. Several reps reporting the user to the “security” division, which handles investigating bad accounts and actioning them. But for my particular case, every time they sent an appeal, which had to be offline, something not-so-magical would happen. I’d end up getting put in a queue that was processed by the eBay Germany team.
Eventually one rep was able to explain to me that my case, while already closed, had been opened in eBay Germany. It had turned out that my buyer, with a shipping address in China (and an account address in Hong Kong), they had purchased through the eBay Germany website. That seemed like an odd twist at first. It would take several more calls until I found someone who understood the topology of the eBay corporate structure more to explain.
The eBay sites, while all part of the same company, slices up their websites based on locality. The websites each operate under their own User Agreements and policies. When you agree to sell globally in eBay, you’re implicitly agreeing to the user agreements of whichever the site the sale takes place on. With a honest buyer/seller, this typically isn’t an issue, as for the most parts the agreements are nearly the same, perhaps only varying in language or things that must vary depending on local law.
eBay Germany, however, carries some very specific differences: In terms of user protection, they very specifically carry the ‘eBay Buyer Protection Program’, as many eBay sites too. However, eBay Germany does not have the eBay ‘Money Back Guarantee’, which goes into protecting sellers. As well, eBay Germany seems to carry a policy that cases may only be appealed a single time. So each ticket that was generated from the number of phone calls I’ve made have resulted in tickets closed with quick dismissals, as the reply rhetoric used indicates they clearly don’t even bother pulling up the notes, since the case is “closed.”
Additionally, with any number of the eBay North America reps I’ve spoken with, they literally don’t have any tool that can edit/effect/adjust the case, because it’s under “eBay Germany”. My best guess is it’s some sort of EU or Germany specific split that just prevents systems with different rules affecting each other. Between any number of level 1 reps, supervisors, and even managers I’ve spoken with; across departments: none of them could offer any help other than opening another appeals ticket, that would just be dismissed by eBay Germany in short order.
Even when sending appeals to the “local” appeals, there seems to be something in the backend of the system that automatically moves the request over to the eBay Germany queue, resulting in me getting a dismissal, often in a language I neither speak nor understand.
The Barrier
I spent the these days talking to dozens of support reps, reading user-agreements, pointing out where and how the scammer broke not only eBay NA User Agreement’s “Abusive Buyer Policy”, but also the German equivalent. I’ve demonstrated how those violations should allow eBay to fix this situation, but eBay Germany has been mind numbingly unhelpful. While every eBay NA rep I eventually convince to fact that something needs to be done, the eBay Germany folx disregard my emails completely.
I can’t even contact eBay Germany directly: They don’t offer live chat that I’ve been able to find. Their call back system won’t even accept a request from my account, because my phone number isn’t a German number. I did manage to get transferred into the German call queue from the NA queue at one point, but that was equally fruitless, as the wonderfully patient reps I spoke to, spoke barely enough English to tell me to write an email.
It seems that the scammer may have chosen to purchase through eBay Germany for the buyer-only protections. Intended or not, it has also had the additional huge hurdle of crossing the language barrier. Between a good number of the emails I receive being ones I have to run through translators, the time difference, and the actual policy differences, it’s almost elegant in how well it’s been an effective firewall in preventing properly resolving my case.
The Artist…
Credit where it’s due: the scam artist got me. And I consider myself as one of the particularly savvy, confident in my actions. I had assumed that even though I might have been scammed at the beginning of my transaction, that I would be in the clear. Especially having the literal good to go from an eBay CS agent, I thought that even if the unimaginable happened, I’d be safe.
I feel for the other victims in the scammer’s feedback profile who clearly have fallen for the same ruse as I. Unfortunately for the scammer, I’m not quite as easily dissuaded from remaining resolute and resourceful in an atmosphere of extreme pessimism.
The End?
The scammer’s account is now banned. The mountain of evidence I was able to uncover and provide was able to help the security team make a swift decision in actioning the account. I also found two other accounts (with far more feedback) that appear to be related to the same person, and with the help of a manager have sent them to the security team as well.
This same senior manager I spoke to also helped me compile a considerable service request, that his colleagues believe should be able to accomplish not just correcting the “resolution” of the case that was closed against me, but actually revert it as it never should have been opened in the first place.
I am however, sorry to disappoint with this conclusion: You’re caught up to now. That ‘megaticket’ was sent off last night, and I haven’t heard anything. Which is partially a good sign, as that means the German team didn’t get it and immediately close it! I also followed up on my most-recently open ticket on the German side with direct information about how the fraudulent buyer directly violated the policies they were hiding behind to defend their decision. It’s also now been more than 24 hours since I’ve sent that, typically having got responses from them in less than half an hour.
At many moments, eBay’s support has been absolutely useless in many ways. To the point where my twitter complaints haven’t even garnered well meaning responses from their social media presence, as many times they will. Their systems & company is structured in a way where loopholes like the ones I’ve discovered are ripe for being exploited like this, and the company as a whole isn’t nearly agile enough to resolve complex cases. That said, nearly every human being I’ve actually spoken to has been incredibly kind, patient, and understanding. While they often can’t fix what is wrong, they have all tried their hardest to be polite as they try and do their job. eBay’s training on that front gets a top score.
At this point, I’m hopeful. Perhaps that’s more naivete, but with the amount of people that have agreed with me along this way, I’m confident that there is a solution, despite being told by literally dozens of reps that there’s nothing they could do.
FAQ
- Why write this? First and foremost: I think this scam is only going to get more popular, especially with the current value and shortage of silicon. I highly doubt I’m the last person who’s going to fall for it, but if I can help one person catch it before making my mistake, it was worth it. Plus I enjoy writing poorly.
- Okay, why else? This started with just venting on Twitter about the absolute absurdity of the situation. It was a lot of complaining about the relative uselessness of many eBay support representatives, and their lack of ability to change anything. Plus their desire to all reiterate why the case was closed in the first place, because it seems no one was able to read a ticket before immediately responding about the information gained at a cursory glance. Several of my Twitter followers have gotten invested in the story, so I said I’d write out the details in a way that should at least be entertaining if hopefully not informative.
- Any tips about eBay Support? I’m pretty sure they can’t hang up on you. Based on the amount of time that incredibly polite and empathetic reps spent letting me ramble and re-tell my story, I’m pretty sure they’re a little bit like Baymax of Big Hero 6. They can’t deactivate until you say you’re satisfied with your care. Assuming you are polite, anyways. It always pays to be assertive, but polite when on the phone with any support. Don’t raise your voice, don’t curse (unless it’s casually and you’ve built rapport with a rep,) and politely refuse to take no for an answer if you’re in the right. Remember that most agents want to help you, they either just don’t have the tools to, or literally have jobs that are designed to try and prevent people from escalating to more senior staff.
- What’s eBay’s Support structured like? So, this is just my best guess based on how I’ve been passed around. They have several departments: “INR” (Item Not Received), “Trust and Safety”, “Security”, “Escalations”, “Appeals”, some sort of retentions team that I never got the full title for, and likely others that I’m not aware of. At least in some of those divisions, the representatives have supervisors, as well as well as a “CSE” I think was the term used? They were some sort of team-assistant that had training and knowledge of more things than the average rep. Supervisors had managers above them. I spent about an hour on the phone with a manager who was actually the one person who in this whole process was actually the most useless across the breadth of anyone I actually was able to speak to. Eventually after confirming the existence of senior managers but still refusing to transfer me to one, he had gotten incredibly frustrated. I remained polite and unyielding in my position. The manager even went as far as to pretend to hang up on me at one point, with the other end going silent. I had already reached the conclusion that reps weren’t allowed to hang up on me, so I just waited. 10 minutes of silence later, he came back and immediately told me he had a senior manager who he would be transferring me to.
- Can I/we/outlet publish about this? Almost certainly. Before you do, please reach out to me, as I’d love to clarify anything before you do.
If you read all this? Cheers, I’ll take ya out for a drink when the pandemic is over. Be careful out there selling your parts as you upgrade your rigs!