Well, I wonder when I'll eventually get a email like this out of nowhere. Though I have a feeling my eBay account was already deleted or whatever for not having used it for years anyways.

Though this makes me wonder, if this is the result of "mass reporting/flagging" and eBay's staff just thinking "oh there's nothing suspicious about these flags this must be serious!" as if none of the people on staff have ever been briefed on such a phenomena as well as "social engineering".

Such illogical events happen to the best of us. YouTube removed my video on dgVoodoo2 and DXVK because "harmful content".

5-6 of them got flagged the same and reappealing does nothing.

This is probably the 100th nested IF in the "AI" they are using that flagged the account. Something like "last login more than 5 years ago, from continent x, first login after that changed password, different continent". A bug in the flagging logic that is not easy to happen.

the dormant account probably got hacked and was being used to make fraudulent sales

I log into all accounts at least once a year because of this. I usually take the opportunity to change the password too.

(This is non-trivial as I have multiple eBay, Google/YouTube, Yahoo, Microsoft and other accounts.)

ETA: As an aside, I'm glad to see that Google removed the requirement for telephone verification for all accounts. I was locked out of several of my accounts for several years because I refused to give them my telephone number. I guess so many people complained about this that they got rid of it.

konc wrote on 2024-01-03, 07:06:

This is probably the 100th nested IF in the "AI" they are using that flagged the account. Something like "last login more than 5 years ago, from continent x, first login after that changed password, different continent". A bug in the flagging logic that is not easy to happen.

Yeah... anything signed 'From Ebay' is just machine generated. Leaving an account active but unused for 20years, and the next first activity is change credentials, would likely have raised a red flag....ie; user has died and someone else not them has found the departed's credentials and is hijacking the account. Yonks back this red flag would've been passed to human agent attention, but now it's cheaper/easier to just let the machine handle it, defaultly close the account... and then wait and see if a real human being complains about the action --- no complaint? Presume it was a bot 'sleeper' account, or else user has indeed passed away. Either way, the account closure is justified, as no human (user) responded.

Not that I've had much trouble with ebay over at least the same amount of years, but when something has gone awry it's invariably 'just the machine' and no one person is behind it, so I take no personal affront when it has happened ~ I instead concentrate on ?why? it happened...which wrt ebay, means getting a case number, and exchanging emails with a human ebay agent, to divine the cause/reason. Once it becomes obvious to both the ebay agent & yourself that's it's a {ahem} "system operation", they pretty much fix it all without you needing to ask - they ask you instead. There is still camaraderie alive between humans, when they realize some damn machine did it =)

Errius wrote on 2024-01-03, 20:20:

ETA: As an aside, I'm glad to see that Google removed the requirement for telephone verification for all accounts. I was locked out of several of my accounts for several years because I refused to give them my telephone number. I guess so many people complained about this that they got rid of it.

It's because now you cannot create a new account without verifying your phone number, I guess they just stopped doing it for existing accounts . Other big email providers do the same btw.

I understand that Google are going to start deleting inactive accounts and so they probably did this to avoid the bad PR from lots of people losing their accounts because of the difficulty of verifying them. They'll probably reinstate the old policy again in future.

In the old days you could verify things like this by just supplying a second email address. I assume they want our numbers for tracking/marketing reasons.

konc wrote on 2024-01-03, 07:06:

This is probably the 100th nested IF in the "AI" they are using that flagged the account. Something like "last login more than 5 years ago, from continent x, first login after that changed password, different continent". A bug in the flagging logic that is not easy to happen.

yes i'd say that was it. more of that to come as mixed flow chart type logic and AI combine to remove the last vestiges of human judgement from all organisations!..