Inside View from Ireland: Suspended by eBay

The first significant event of 2005 to mark my digital life comes from eBay. They have suspended me from selling or buying things on eBay. I am not alone--according to Google, more than 3800 people have been "suspended from ebay". Their suspension stems from a pissing contest I have with Paypal, the extortionists aligned with eBay who have refused during the past eight months to disburse $810 of my funds into a real world checking account. Paypal has sentenced me to a revolving door where there are no real people to reconcile my questions. They simply do not give a damn about my situation, refuse to talk to me, and will undoubtedly keep my money under the terms and conditions signed over to them when I set up my seller account. This sucks and will probably mean launching a court case against eBay in Ireland.

The first suspension letter from eBay reads:

We regret to inform you that your eBay account could be suspended.

To resolve this problems please click here and re-enter your account information. If your problems could not be resolved your account will be suspended for a period of 3-4 days, after this period your account will be terminated.

For the User Agreement, Section 9, we may immediately issue a warning, temporarily suspend, indefinitely suspend or terminate your membership and refuse to provide our services to you if we believe that your actions may cause financial loss or legal liability for you, our users or us. We may also take these actions if we are unable to verify or authenticate any information you provide to us.

Due to the suspension of this account, please be advised you are prohibited from using eBay in any way. This includes the registering of a new account. Please note that this suspension does not relieve you of your agreed-upon obligation to pay any fees you may owe to eBay.

Regards,Safeharbor Department eBay, Inc

I like eBay but despise Paypal for the treatment given me. I will probably resurface on eBay in one of my stateside personas, using a credit card from another continent.

In the meantime, eBay isn't even coming close to the $150 a month I spend on Amazon and the $35 a month I spend for music. It's actually a loss for both of us because competition normally serves both sides of the counter. In this regard, I despise working with the Paypal on the other side of the eBay counter.

If you are reading this because you too have been suspended by eBay, please know that I tried the normal circumvention tactics--used a different name, got an anonymous prepaid Mastercard with the made-up name and address, connected my account with a bogus bank account number. I also tried logging on with a different computer, so I had no residual history in my cache or cookies. I don't know what I failed to see, but eBay spotted me coming into the system and they blocked me again.