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Comment by WXLCKNO | Hacker News Reader

I'm banned from eBay since about 2010. Sold a cellphone which my sister shipped without requiring signature, guy just said he never received it.

My sister was working at a Telco so we just confirmed that he had actually received it because he put a SIM card into it, proof and everything eBay didn't care.

I withdrew the money from my PayPal account before they could claw it back. PayPal still works for me but eBay is amazingly impressive at immediately banning any new account I tried created since then.

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Sounds like your sister got that information illegally. It’s hard to blame EBay because they can’t use that.

But you also can't blame Ebay for letting the guy steal? Ebay just can't be blamed ever, seems like a great position to be in.

Private companies have no limits on using illegally obtained information. It's very common practice. You're thinking about governments and law enforcement agencies.

This is an interesting thought experiment. If the buyer acts as though they did not receive the phone, then on what basis can they complain if you look up metadata of an IMEI that they contend they never took possession of?

But when the lookup reveals that they did activate the device, now maybe you've inappropriately accessed someone else's PII and you did believe beforehand that the results would show that it was no longer registered to you.

Situations like these really annoy me. And the platform's complete disregard is infuriating.

when ebay was "invented", i remember reading articles talking about how amazing it was that it actually worked, total strangers would send each other goods and money across the internet.

the incredulity was that everybody imagined that there would be more scammers out there than honest people, but there weren't.

but what is ebay supposed to do about people who claim they sent things vs people who claim they didn't receive things?

I get that it’s tricky for eBay to determine who’s being truthful, but ignoring evidence feels unfair

Car (and other I assume) forums always were a magical place in this regard. You send a random person a PayPal, they send the part or piece. There were always a few people who got taken here and there but the self moderating and reputational aspects of a forum really kept things quite in check.

Accountability and reputation is the missing secret sauce in this world it seems.

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