We’ve heard there has been an unusual amount of fraudulent bidding in the last week. Certainly there is no question that there were a large number of hijacked accounts with a mass pharming attack reported on 22nd February. eBay have been restoring accounts to the rightful owners but it’s unclear if all cancelled auctions were fraudulent, or whether genuine transactions have been removed in the process of restoring accounts. If an account has been compromised it’s better that eBay cancel all transactions rather than risk leaving fradulent ones unpaid with feedback to follow.
What we do know is that lots of sellers are receiving emails from eBay saying that their items have been cancelled due to alleged fraudulent bidding:
Dear [User ID] ([email address]),
The results of the following listings have been cancelled due to bidding activity that took place without the account owner’s authorisation:
[Item Number] [Item Title]
We have temporarily suspended the bidding account and we are working with the account owner to prevent any additional unauthorised activity. Since the account owner did not initiate these bids, fees resulting from the listings in question have been credited to your account.
Unfortunately, it is not possible for us to automatically relist these items for you. Instead, to relist these items you will need to start from the beginning of the listing process, either through the Sell Your Item process or through your third party listing service. We know that this is an inconvenience and we apologise for the negative impact it may cause you. We are working on tools to allow you to relist your items without starting from the beginning, but they are not available at this time.
Do not respond to this email, as your reply will not be received. If there are issues that have not been addressed by this message, you can contact us by clicking the “Help” link located at the top of most eBay pages and selecting “Contact Us” from the menu on the left hand side of the page.
We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.
Regards,
eBay Trust & Safety
Much as that may be a pain for sellers we do suggest that you check your account invoice. It’s come to our attention that auctions ended in this manner are having insertion fees refunded, but not final value fees (which are of course normally greater!). eBay are currently trying to figure out how to credit final value fees en masse, but currently only sellers that contact support are being manually refunded.
If you’ve had a TKO notice of an auction being cancelled we suggest you check your eBay invoice for the appropriate refunds.
3 Responses
I haven’t gotten a TKO notice in awhile, do you think these groups crawl ebay with a bot or manually to get emails?
Erm, eBay Tools person – this is a real one. 🙄
Give me a break!!! Why do they not have at least a pnone number to TALK with someone when this happens.