How To Get Help From Ebay's Safeharbor Team
December 4th, 2008

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How to Get Help from eBay’s SafeHarbor Team.

SafeHarbor are the eBay police department. If a buyer does something they're not supposed to, then it's SafeHarbor you should be reporting it to.

Non-paying Buyers.

This is the most common rule buyers break -- it's all too easy for them to just change their minds and try to get out of the auction. eBay, however, regard every auction as a contract. They will punish the buyer for you if they don't go through with their end of the deal, by giving them a ‘strike’ against their account. A buyer who doesn’t consistently doesn’t pay for items they win will probably get banned.

To report a non-paying buyer, you need to file an ‘Unpaid Item’ dispute, which you can do here: http://feedback.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?CreateDispute. All you need is the item number. Once you do this, eBay will send the buyer a reminder that they must pay for the item they won, wait a while, and then take action against them. You must wait 7 days before you can file a dispute.

This isn't that helpful to you, of course, since in most cases you still won't get paid for the item or have anyone to post it to: it is a rare buyer who responds to eBay's threats and pays up just to avoid a little warning from eBay. You will, however, at least get a refund of your final value fee and be able to relist the item for free - and you can send a second chance offer to someone else if you want.

Auction Interference.

If someone ends up with a grudge against you, then you might find that they start emailing your bidders and telling them that you’re a scammer, they should cancel they bid, they shouldn’t deal with you, and so on. You might even find that you have unscrupulous competitors who will try this tactic to get buyers to bid on their auctions instead!

SafeHarbor will investigate this for you - the procedure to report it is to click ‘Help’ on the toolbar, then ‘Contact us’ from the menu. This can be a bit of a maze: you need to choose ‘Report problems with other eBay members’, then ‘Problems with buyers’, then finally ‘User is emailing buyers to warn them about seller or item’. This will then let you send SafeHarbor an email.

Feedback Extortion.

You might find that someone tries to intimidate you into giving them something using the threat of negative feedback - in its crudest form, this could be as simple as "Pay me $20 or I’ll leave you a negative comment".

To report this to SafeHarbor, you should also use ‘Contact Us’, making sure you attach all the emails you have that prove the extortion happened

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From: Robert Minnick
Comment:

I am trying to buy a car in Spain - the seller referred me to an ebay transaction #2449117514 and informed me that trust account was to be supervised by eBay SafeHarbor Team.  Is this the case?  I would appreciate any help regarding this matter.  Thanks,

Bob

From: Brooque Williams
Comment:

I am trying to buy a car from UTAH- the seller had ebay's safe harbor team e-mail me fromtheir security center. They said I had to send the money using money gram to a ebay agent by the name of Linda Daymon. Her adress is 221 18th street S.E., Calgary, CANADA , AlbertaThey told me to fax the reciept to 408-402-8441. Can you let me know pleaseif this is th case...THANKS!!!    

From: chelsey H
Comment:

Brooque,

Hey just wanting to know if you went through with buying the car from utah.  Please leave a message on here if you did.  I would like to talk to you about that.

 

 

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