Tell HN: If you bid on a car on eBay the seller gets your phone number | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: If you bid on a car on eBay the seller gets your phone number

7 pointstehwebguy8 comments

Just found this out the hard way.

I never thought to post this here; it's true. And they will spam you with texts and phone calls trying to sell you that car or some other car.

I asked one nicely to stop spamming me and they responded with something obnoxious as if they were genuinely trying to help me. I reminded him his actions were against ebay policy and I would report them. I doubt it mattered.

I stopped bidding on cars now, screw ebay.

Edit: worth noting, you don't need to win the car. Simply the act of bidding discloses your phone number.

This is really bad news. I have seen multiple sellers with this unnecessary condescending attitude as you mention. Even when their city is under social-distancing restrictions, they are insisting on pick-up in person and coming into their house to "sign off" that the goods are working.

Someone needs to take these lemonade-stand sellers down a notch or four. Were ebay to extend the feedback mechanism to pre-bidding / pre-purchase queries, the participants would be forced to clean up their act. It seems that ebay is not incentivized (enough) to do this, and so the situation persists.

They should get absolutely nothing at all until after payment, what the fuck.

eBay practically permanently bans everyone involved if you dare take conversation offsite on normal items.

Last year I found a used petrol hedge trimmer 5 mins drive from home on eBay. Tried to arrange to see the item working in person but my messages to the guy kept vanishing. Eventually I managed to send him a photo of my phone number and arrange to see it. Got a warning email containing specific quotes from my messages and telling me that my account would be banned if I ever tried exchanging contact details again.

Interestingly under UK law, business sellers must display contact details (address and phone) on listings. eBay seems to do its best to hide this info at the bottom of the page inside a js pop out.

I use Craigslist for in-person transactions. Bonus is that they don't take a cut.

Interesting. I sold a car on ebay a few years ago but don't remember seeing a phone number until they won.

It's probably in a location you didn't find because you weren't looking for it.

I was thinking that, or they changed it in the past 4 or so years.

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