eBay is terrible

[koalacollect]

We sell all the time, you get a strike if you don't send right away. We get this today:

Hello swanbullion,

We’re writing to let you know that we had to cancel the following transaction(s) because the item(s) were purchased without the account owner's permission: X

Please do not ship any items that were purchased by X and disregard any bids they may have placed on any of your listings. We’re working with the account owner to prevent any additional unauthorized activity.

If you already sent the item(s) and they haven’t been delivered yet, please contact your shipping carrier to find out if you can stop the shipment.

- We have credited any associated fees to your account.

---------

This was sold on the 21st of May, and collected from the PO on the 29th May. We received this email today, how bad is eBay?!

[sugar249]

Can you really blame Ebay,  someone most likely hijacked the account, or did other some non legal method of making the purchase.

The actual owner of the account has most likely only just had their end of month statement, and noticed a non approved transaction, and taken it up with their bank.

What could Ebay have done?

[jellybirddesigns]

Has Ebay tried to hold back money?

You should be covered by the Seller Protections if you shipped within your handling period, with tracking, to the address on record. Was the item high value and require a signature on delivery?

There's no way you could know what the reasons are behind this - whether the buyers account was actually hijacked, or if they are trying to scam you.

[digital*ghost]

The last time this happened to me, eBay wasn't managing payments and all that happened was the transaction was cancelled, but the PayPal funds were never reversed or even contested - I assume because the person just claimed someone else used the eBay account to make a purchase, but they never claimed someone else used their PayPal account (or other payment source) to pay for that purchase. (It was such a weird claim to make at the time, like who hacks someone's eBay account just to buy something, when you can just check-out as a guest, but I digress). 

The timing of the transaction to the message aside, now that ebay allows people to put a card on file and automatically pay for items, plus they have much more control over the funds once paid, they might try to reverse the payments, but like springy mentioned, this should have the same kind of protection of any other "unauthorised use" case (though they don't actually even have specific policies for this kind of scenario, the unauthorised use comes the closest). More so, even, because a hacked account can easily be argued to be a security failing on eBay's part, if not ignorance / complacency on the buyer's part, so why make sellers pay for that? Oh, that's right, the big corporations don't like taking liability, and even in cases where the buyer clearly contributed to the circumstances (like falling for a phishing email), if you make them liable for their mistake, they might not spend money on the site anymore, so sellers it is. ‌‌

If they have reversed the funds and you would have qualified for protection under any other circumstance (and it sounds like you would), I'd get on chat and ask them why it wasn't applied. The transaction being well over 2 months ago has the most relevance here - it's an automated email, of course, and seems to assume someone with a hacked account would notice immediately if there is fraudulent activity, and in the obvious absence of that diligence (lol), surely eBay's "fraud detection" is robust enough to be a bit quicker off the mark, too. (lol, again). 

Good luck.