Ebay Sucks - Continued

After my ebay fiasco several weeks ago (here), I got in touch with a friend, who is a VP at ebay, because I was really at wits end with this whole ordeal. He, in turn, had people from both ebay and paypal contact me about the issues I had with ebay fraud and their crappy customer support. I had two vastly different experiences with the paypal and ebay representatives that contacted me. Here's what transpired.

Paypal

I received a call from the office of the president of PayPal. We went through my entire ordeal, him interrupting me with apologies left and right. It was nice, maybe a little too nice, but hey, at least I was speaking with a real person at this point in time. While he assured me that ebay was doing something about my specific case, he couldn't tell me what they were doing. In addition, even though I had contacted the police and FBI myself - they still couldn't engage law enforcement on their end. It had to come from law enforcement. There were lots of useless reasons behind this. But it was apparent that it wasn't changing anytime soon.

While the call was cordial. I actually felt better after speaking to him. Not because anything was changing or going to change - but because he admitted that their situation certainly was in a less than perfect state.

According to this person, they are constantly revisiting their procedures for dealing with situations regarding fraud. And they're happy to take my advice into account. While it felt good to hear that, I just don't buy it. Nonetheless, he left me his phone number, asked me not to give it out (which I won't), and told me to get in touch again with any issues I had in the future. span style="font-weight:bold;">Ebay

I was expecting a similar discussion when ebay contacted me. Well, wrong again. Ebay, while courteous, kept our discussion to email. It was also a very defensive exchange rather than a how can we be helpful to our customers. In fact, several times in the email, the woman explained how and why ebay couldn't do anything about my situation. She said something along the lines of, well, since it wasn't ebay's servers that were compromised, and it was your account, there's nothing we can do. Some people who aren't computer literate may take that comment and say. Oh, ok. But I don't buy that. Just because ebay doesn't think their servers were compromised, certainly doesn't mean that. A simple password attack could have compromised the servers. Or, like old Unix servers, a password file may have been left encrypted somewhere for someone to hack. Whatever the case, she was dead wrong. For some background on Vladuz - a Romanian hacker who compromised ebay's site without them knowing... here.

She responded that she was wrong and babbled breathlessly for the rest of the email. I had already stopped listening. I just hope ebay doesn't stop listening to its customers.