Probably not widely known:
when your lifetime purchase total at Ebay exceeds $10,000, Ebay will cut you off unless you provide more personal information in their 'Get Verified' program. They will want 2 forms of payment information in their system, one or 2 bank accounts, and/or a credit card.
The beauty of this is for folks like me with 1 credit card and 1 bank account, one instance of hacking can put me totally out of business. I responded by setting up a temporary bank account (back when it was free to do so at my bank), gave Ebay the info (I already had given them my credit card info since I like the additional protection they offer) on that account. Once Ebay made sure the account was real (by them depositing successfully $0.08 and $0.05) I closed it out.
Also, it seems Ebay always defaults to a bank account as the primary way to pay, if you want to use a credit card (for the additional protections) you will need to change your payment method on every purchase, and the change icon is as small as they can make it.
My understanding is the guvmint has leaned on Ebay to institute the additional hassles at the $10,000 level to control money laundering. Considering it took me upwards of 500 individual purchases to reach my $10,000 threshold, I'm not sure what kind of plausible money laundering operation I might be running here, but I guess somebody somewhere sleeps better at night knowing I have been annoyingly inconvenienced for it.
Now that Ebay has been hacked, I do have that nice warm fuzzy feeling of having been correct, all along.
Even though I still will buy from Ebay, I think they've earned a great big "go fuck yourself".
when your lifetime purchase total at Ebay exceeds $10,000, Ebay will cut you off unless you provide more personal information in their 'Get Verified' program. They will want 2 forms of payment information in their system, one or 2 bank accounts, and/or a credit card.
The beauty of this is for folks like me with 1 credit card and 1 bank account, one instance of hacking can put me totally out of business. I responded by setting up a temporary bank account (back when it was free to do so at my bank), gave Ebay the info (I already had given them my credit card info since I like the additional protection they offer) on that account. Once Ebay made sure the account was real (by them depositing successfully $0.08 and $0.05) I closed it out.
Also, it seems Ebay always defaults to a bank account as the primary way to pay, if you want to use a credit card (for the additional protections) you will need to change your payment method on every purchase, and the change icon is as small as they can make it.
My understanding is the guvmint has leaned on Ebay to institute the additional hassles at the $10,000 level to control money laundering. Considering it took me upwards of 500 individual purchases to reach my $10,000 threshold, I'm not sure what kind of plausible money laundering operation I might be running here, but I guess somebody somewhere sleeps better at night knowing I have been annoyingly inconvenienced for it.
Now that Ebay has been hacked, I do have that nice warm fuzzy feeling of having been correct, all along.
Even though I still will buy from Ebay, I think they've earned a great big "go fuck yourself".
