Our friend Ina Steiner over at AuctionBytes has just has a bit of a shock. eBay asked her Internet Host to block her new EcommerceBytes blog and redirect users to an eBay anti-phishing page. eBay mistakenly thought a blog post about eBay’s buyer protection program was an attempt to commit fraud and entice people to enter their eBay log in credentials.
Ina of course is well connected within eBay and fired off a few emails and voice mails and was pretty quickly assured that eBay were working on it. The result was a retraction notice to the AuctionBytes Internet Host requesting them to cancel any blocks or redirects they had applied to the account.
It’s good that eBay are scanning for phishing pages, but there are two strange things here. Firstly surely someone who’s job at eBay is to hunt out and take down phishing sites would keep abreast of industry news and be aware of a site such as AuctionBytes – that suggests a human may not even have looked at the page prior to firing off a take down request. Secondly eBay would probably recognise the comment fields of a blog, but AuctionBytes now require you to create and account and log in prior to commenting. That combined with the content of the post in question could have been enough to trigger eBay’s alarm bells.
We don’t require Tamebay readers to create an account in order to leave a comment, but even if we did eBay should be able to recognise the difference between a log in on the Internet and a log in to eBay. Of course if you wanted to comment with your eBay ID as an alias it could be tempting to use the same password but we’d strongly recommend that you don’t.
4 Responses
” to hunt out and take down phishing sites would keep abreast of industry news and be aware of a site such as AuctionBytes ”
Eh?
ebay are so far up their own bum they never see daylight! never mind other sites
Several years ago I had an id banned for life on the eBay forums because someone went to my myworld page and saw a link to one of my sites. The problem was that my site had a login page and obviously any site with a login page linked from eBay is trying to phish for eBay passwords. I tried to explain it would be ridiculous to just let anyone access anyone else’s account that was authenticated by the API. That it would also be a gross violation of the eBay developer’s agreement regarding public vs private data. But no one would hear of it. Funny thing is that eBay never suspended the actual account, removed the link, nor reported me to my host. Nor did my posts violate any rules.
15 months later I was shaking John Donahoe’s hand and he was telling me what great work I’m doing yet I’m still banned from the forums to this day.
One can’t help but have a vague feeling that someone down at ebay HQ might have had an axe to grind.
Perhaps eBay is trying to keep them from reporting all the technical issues that have been ongoing since April? If you check out the technical issues forum, sellers are seeing huge losses due to these issues. I for one am down 80% for the last 6 weeks.