Reselling News: eBay Shuts Off Community Direct Messages After a Phishing Wave

A scam does not have to be sophisticated to work on a busy seller. It only has to show up somewhere you were not braced for it. This week it showed up in a place eBay had spent the previous week telling everyone to trust.

eBay pulled Community direct messages on September 1

eBay relaunched its Community forum in late August and pitched the rebuilt site as a safe place for buyers and sellers to talk. Within days, scammers were using the new direct message feature to impersonate an eBay security team, telling members their accounts would be restricted unless they verified within 24 hours, then routing them to a page that asked for credit card details. Value Added Resource has the full timeline, including a moderator saying on the afternoon of August 31 that a fix was close.

On September 1 the direct message panel disappeared from the forum. eBay confirmed it had "temporarily disabled private messaging on Community to protect our members," citing a rise in phishing attempts sent through the feature, and acknowledged that some of the messages were hard to spot as fakes. Messaging was still off as of this writing.

What to do about it: treat any account warning that arrives outside your eBay inbox as false until proven otherwise. Real notices land in Messages inside your account and in email from eBay, never in a forum DM, and eBay never asks for a card number to keep an account open. Do not click through from the message. Open a new tab, type the site address yourself, and check your account status there. Suspicious emails go to spoof@ebay.com, and eBay keeps a plain rundown of the tells on its phishing help page. This matters more in the next 90 days than it did in July, because scam volume rises with holiday order volume, and a seller processing 30 sales a day reads messages faster and more carelessly than a seller processing three.

Auctions get bidder verification and a wider unpaid item block

Buried in eBay's September seller news are two changes to how auctions handle buyers. eBay says it may now verify additional buyer details before an auction, and that buyers with repeat unpaid items across multiple accounts will be blocked from bidding. The second half is the interesting part. Non payment has always been tracked per account, which made a new account a cheap reset for anyone who wanted to bid without paying. eBay says no seller action is required.

What to do about it: take the help, then set your own floor anyway. Buyer Requirements in Seller Hub let you block buyers who have unpaid item strikes on record, who have no payment method on file, and who live in countries you do not ship to. Those settings are yours and they apply immediately, while a platform level fix rolls out on someone else's schedule. If you plan to run auctions through the fourth quarter, turn them on before the volume arrives, and read the unpaid item policy so you know how long you have to wait before you can relist and recover the fee.

Etsy adds ad groups

Etsy rolled out Ad Groups this week, letting sellers sort advertised listings into as many as 20 groups, with performance reporting per group. A listing can move between groups but can only sit in one at a time. Etsy is also showing some sellers an offer to unlock extra ad budget on days when sales hit a goal, checked daily, dropping back to the normal cap when they do not.

What to do about it: use the grouping before you take the money. Sorting your ads into best sellers, new listings, and everything else finally shows you which slice of the shop the budget is actually feeding, and most sellers discover it is not the slice they assumed. Extra spend on a group that already loses money just loses it faster.

The takeaway

Two of this week's three stories are about the same skill, which is deciding what deserves your trust. A message that wants your card, a bidder with no history, an offer of more ad budget. None of them are automatically bad and none of them are automatically fine, and the seller who checks before reacting keeps the money. Working out which checks are worth your time is a lot of what we do inside The Income Lab.

Hero photo by Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.