Avoid Ebay, Too

Yet another awful US company

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

Last time I wrote that we should avoid Android and Google. Truth is, nearly every big US company is evil, incompetent, complicit in war crimes, or just plain bad. Boycott the whole lot of them.

Only today I read this about Ebay. It’s like something from a horror novel, yet is completely true:

“E-commerce giant eBay has just agreed to pay $56 million to settle a lawsuit for damages caused by the company’s shockingly aggressive gangstalking operation against a Massachusetts couple who criticized the company’s wealthy executives. A former CIA employee who worked as eBay’s global security chief orchestrated psychological operations against the couple, in which “people working for eBay bombarded them with online threats and bizarre deliveries including a bloody pig mask, live spiders, and a funeral wreath.” The operations reportedly also included “following the couple around town and trying to attach a tracker to their car”. Then-CEO Devin Wenig was paid 152 times more than the typical eBay employee. The Boston Globe reports that Wenig repeatedly told his employees that he wanted to “take her down”, in reference to the couple. While some eBay employees wound up serving jail time for the abuses, no executives from the company have ever been charged. The Boston Globe reports that Wenig resigned from his position in 2019 after the gangstalking scandal came to light, “keeping $17 million of annual compensation and $40 million of severance.” If you have enough money in this dystopia, you can get trained spies to target innocent civilians with criminal psyops on your behalf and then walk away free from any meaningful consequences.” [Source]

If I’d known that I’d never have used Ebay. So it seems a good time to give an example of how Ebay is used to sell counterfeit goods, and how Ebay makes it impossible to report it when you discover this. It creates a shield of protection over the criminals selling fake items on Ebay.

Let me take you through my recent experience.

I bought something on Ebay

Two of these:

The title is misleading, suggesting you have an option of 1 TB or 2 TB. I was ordering a relatively modest pair of 512 GB drives (which is half of a TB).

UK seller, items shipped from the UK, Lenovo branded (not no-name), good reviews for the seller … I did all the preliminary checking I could. They weren’t ridiculously cheap or anything that might have raised suspicion. Just the price you often see from a company with few overheads that relies on bulk sales.

They were to be a gift for my mother, who needed a backup solution for her laptop.

I had to buy them as a “guest purchase” (i.e. without an account) as I can’t create an Ebay account due to them rejecting my email address for some bizarre reason. Plus, I don’t want an Ebay account. The guest purchase option is promoted and available, and Ebay promises you still have buyer protection.

The USB sticks eventually arrived. Yay.

I tried to back up her data, but started to get weird errors.

Same with the other USB stick.

I tried reformatting them, in various ways. Again, weird errors.

But I didn’t give up. I read a lot of articles about USB sticks, formatting, storage.

Then I found these:

• The USB Storage Scam That Should Never Have Been Possible: How Fake Capacity Drives Fool Every Operating System

• How To Recognize Fake Storage Devices

tl;dr: it turns out that the USB standard doesn’t check what storage a portable media item has: it just “asks” the item. So, if someone makes a 256 GB USB stick, they can program it so it “looks” like a 1 TB USB stick to an operating system, which treats it as such, even though it only really has a quarter of the capacity.

What happens then? The operating system keeps running into errors, as it expects space to write data to, but finds none. So it starts over-writing the existing data, which garbles it, and leads to errors.

Most people might not even realise this is happening. It may take them a long time to fill a storage media. By that point, when errors start occurring, the item is probably long out of warranty. Or they will assume it is just a bug in their software or data, or the hardware is finally giving way. They won’t realise they’ve actually been conned.

And that’s what I suspected.

Techie time

So I decided to investigate the true storage capacity of the USB sticks.

Asking the devices doesn’t work, because they can lie.

But the clever method that can be used is this: write sequential, numbered data to the device. When it gives errors and won’t record any more, the numbers can be used to determine at what point the capacity ran out: and, therefore, what the real storage capacity of the drive is.

I decided to use the command line program f3 - Fight Flash Fraud. I probed the drive with a form of this command:

f3probe --destructive --time-ops /dev/sdb

And here were the astonishing results:

The key parts are that the USB sticks have an “announced size” of 500 GB. That’s what they have been sold as, and programmed to claim.

500 GB = 500,000 MB

But their real, usable size is … 126 MB.

That is about a four-thousandth of what it was being sold as.

It would take 3,968 of these fake USB sticks to equal 500 GB.

Obviously these aren’t real Lenovo sticks either. They are just counterfeit ones that cost pennies to make, in order to create a scam. Sell these in enough volume and the scammers make millions. They can then shut up shop, and reopen with another name.

That’s how the scam works.

And there is no way to report it

You read that right. I have no way to contact the seller. No way to contact Ebay. No way to report the scam. No way to request a refund from Ebay.

Believe me, I wasted a day trying.

I’m not even going to list every single avenue I tried. Just a few of the more obvious ones. As an example, I’ll number the links in the order confirmation email Ebay sent. Then I can show you what happens when I try to follow them.

1 My Ebay

It takes me to a login page, but guest purchasers don’t have an account so cannot login:

Dead end.

2 Purchases

Same as 1.

3 Track order

After sending me a code it tells me the item was delivered. There is an option to contact the seller: but only if you have an Ebay account … So for me it just fails.

4 Item title

Just takes you to the listing.

5 Seller details

Takes me to a list of items they are selling. There is a “Contact” link! But … it is the same as the one in 3. As a guest purchaser, you can’t contact the seller. Dead end.

I looked at the seller’s negative feedback ratings. Mostly problems contacting the seller, or them selling items that didn’t match the description, including a storage device with a lower capacity …

When I click on “About the seller” I just get a blank box:

Ebay is full of broken links like that.

6 Ebay money back guarantee

Takes you here. Lots of information. All of it useless, or dead ends. For example, it has this section:

But that first step, “Go to My Ebay”? It requires you to have an account and log in. So doesn’t work. Same with the “Get in touch” option: for all the options there, you have to log in first. There’s no way to “get in touch” if you don’t have an account, or were a guest purchaser.

This option looked promising:

“Connect with a real person anytime”. Really? I clicked it.

Then their AI-infested system asked me to prove I wasn’t an AI, in an unintentional incongruity:

Which then takes me here:

Again, you have to have an account to contact them. If you are a guest purchaser: get stuffed. They don’t want to know. I was already losing the will to live.

7 Check status

Same as 3.

8 Update your email preferences

Takes you to an account creation page: without an account, there are no preferences to update.

9 Account protection

Takes you here. Which just takes you to a page for people who have Ebay accounts.

10 Contact us

Takes you here. Not a contact Ebay link, but a generic set of help pages. You can only choose from fixed options. I spent ages trying them all. They eventually take you to a page where you have to log in to your account: you cannot progress if you don’t have an Ebay account. I gave up after an hour as I couldn’t find anything for guest purchasers. I also tried the useless “AI agent” - it sent me round in circles, just giving false information or leading me to dead ends. Beyond frustrating. These “AI” replacements for human contact are utterly shite, and a sign of a bad company that would rather you gave up than actually help you.

So, every link led me to either a dead end, or loops around and around.

Then I found this page: eBay Money Back Guarantee

Or maybe I found it earlier. My eyes are glazing over and my mind is shutting down from following links and ending up at the same dead ends.

The “eBay Money Back Guarantee” page has a whole new set of links. “Report an item hasn’t arrived”, “Request a return”, “Appeal your case” etc. But every single one you click on? Leads to a login page.

When you first purchase as a Guest, Ebay goes on about all your protections, all the help, all the ways to contact them, how safe you are. But as soon as you try to act on any of that you find out that there is literally no way to contact a seller or Ebay if anything goes wrong. Hours later, I am still stuck in the same loops.

That is not an accident. Just as with inbuilt obsolescence, it is “help” systems working as planned: preventing you from contacting staff, since then there is a cost to Ebay. They would apparently rather you just gave up. If Ebay wanted you to get help, there would be an email address or help form at the bottom of every page, which sent your message to a human for action or escalation. It’s a foolproof system. Companies that don’t do it aren’t unaware of it: they don’t want to make things easy.

At one point I found a promising link (I can’t even remember where it was) that promised to send me a means to report a faulty item as a guest purchaser. So I tried it.

Finally! I thought I had found a way in.

This is the email I received from Ebay after going through the process:

You read it right. The key section, the link they promise: blank. Nothing to click on, no way forward.

I did the same process multiple times on different days, using different browsers and computers. The emails were always exactly like this.

Note also that they send these from an address you cannot reply to, removing even that avenue for reaching a human.

Blocked at every turn.

What next?

I contacted my bank. Went through a convoluted process to try and claim the money back as a form of fraud. I had been sent counterfeit, broken items, not as described.

Obviously the amount I would get back is far less than the time spent doing all this research and reporting and trying to return it. But I thought, maybe, just maybe, if this happens enough, and Ebay is penalised, maybe they’ll change their behaviour.

(Also, I thought this post might be useful for highlighting a common scam with storage devices bought from places like Ebay.)

As part of my claim I have to provide evidence of having contacted the seller, and what their response was. Obviously that is normally useful information … but it is based on the assumption that this is even possible.

As my case shows, even after hours of work, I couldn’t find a way to contact the seller or Ebay about this. Or to claim a refund, report fraud, send the item back. Utterly blocked.

Even if I had contacted the seller, what would have happened? They must know they are selling hundreds of thousands of counterfeit products. Do you think they would admit it? Stop doing it? Or would they just ignore communications? They may even have known it was a guest purchase, and that the buyer will have no way of following it up or doing anything without tremendous effort.

That’s the final reason I did this post. It documents both the fraud and the Herculean efforts I made to report it to someone … anyone … and how impossible that turned out to be.

To be continued.

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