Complaint Review: eBay Inc. - San Jose California

What a creepy, dishonest company!!! They advertise that buyers/sellers are protected ("committed to providing a fair and safe marketplace for all buyers and sellers..."), and they take reports of fraud/abuse seriously. They don't!!! Like most of their customers, I got scammed out of $700+. I did everything I was supposed to, reporting it, etc. I gave them high-rez pictures and screenshots - 100% verifiable and indisputable evidence of fraud. I was patient, and after countless phone calls, and emails - dealing with their horrible and incompetent customer service in India - I realized that, it's this way by design.

They don't investigate or follow-up on anything, ever. It's all a sham. They don't even follow their own policies, as stated. They are fully aware, and complicit in rampant fraud on their platform. Their customer service, procedures, policies, etc., are to tell you what you want to hear, 'kick the can', give you the runaround, and get you off of the phone as fast as possible. It's all to wear you down, so you give-up and accept that you got scammed. Period.

What's more, once they realize they have someone who won't give up, they ignore you and actively make it so you can't even contact them. Case in point, you get on their little chat bot, and you tell them what your problem is, and you select contact an agent, and all of a sudden the only option is to send an email - straight to the circular file. What happened to the call or be called by an agent option!? As a test, I cleared out my cookies, and went back through the bot acting as if I was trying to complete a purchase, and POOF! - the option to call or be called by an agent appears. I reproduced this behavior a couple of times. Unbelievably creepy and dishonest!!!

On that point, I would also like to mention that after countless emails back-and-forth with 'customer service' (*wink, wink*), I'm not so sure that those email responses are even coming from a human - it's just an extension of their help bot. The emails you get back are just a cobbled mess of cut-and-pasted, scripted/canned responses to shut you down.  At first I wrote it off as a 'language barrier', incompetent call center employees, etc., just 'kicking the can'. But once you've read a few of them, you start noticing that all the sentences/paragraphs are identical. All the emails you are receiving are just re-ordered emails you've already received - with maybe a sentence or two of 'customization'. Could all off the people they hiried to work in that call center, really have such a poor understanding of the English language? Maybe, but I find the interaction all too eerily similar to their help bot. Creepy!!!

Finally, once you try to escalate the situation, speak to a supervisor/manager, etc., maybe even try a different department - they'll tell you that they'll get back with you, whatever it takes to end your communication attempt at that moment - and you will never hear back from them again. If you follow-up, same thing. That's how they operate. That's a creepy, dishonest company. That's false advertising (and I thought that there were state/federal laws to protect consumers from false/misleading advertisements). That's eBay.