Want To Get Banned From eBay For Life? Try This!

In the early days of eBay there were ways for buyers and sellers to “game” the system. Over their first few years, eBay picked up on what these folks were doing and would tweak their policies and algorithms to watch for unscrupulous practices on both sides of the transactions. Of course, you can’t stop somebody from doing something until you catch them doing it, and that period of time between that they’re getting away with their misdeeds can be quite a while if nobody notices what’s going on. Of course, what we’ve all seen time and again is when somebody finds a scheme that works, they tend to keep pushing the envelope until they do eventually draw attention to themselves.

Radio Personality Rob Pitts made that mistake, and it resulted in eBay banning him from the site… For life.

What Rob was doing, some of you probably heard of, or maybe even did yourself before the auction site implemented steps to combat the practice. After selling countless cars on the site, Rob realized he could created fake accounts and run up the bids on his own auctions. At first, it would just bump up the bids to drive the price up a few more dollars, but eventually got so carried away driving up his prices that he ended up buying his own cars via his fake accounts.

Rob also figured out a way to run up his feedback score, a key factor in the standing of your eBay seller’s rating buy selling himself cheap items over and over. Eventually, eBay realized what was going on and in one fell swoop, locked down all of Pitts’ accounts overnight and mailed him a 17 page certified letter explaining their actions. To this day, Rob cannot open an account without it being shut down within a days time, showing just how serious they were about their ban. They’ve even contacted Rob’s father to make sure he isn’t Rob posing under another name, which I have to admit is a little extreme even for a site as strict as eBay.