Ebay and SAR

[comebackjimmy]

Hello all

 

The misadventures of my sister in law have appeared elsewhere in these forums and here is another unfortunate story but one that has some useful stuff for other CAGers.

 

My sister in Law was selling a high value business item on Ebay and withdrew the sale. I am not aware of the exact circumstances but Ebay charged her a Final Value fee even though it was not sold via Ebay.

 

However, ON THE PHONE they said that if she re-listed the item on E-bay they would credit her the fee so she did. Subsequent follow up with Ebay lead to them denying anything was ever said and subsequently they put her account out to Debt Collectors.

 

To resolve the situation I thought it was necessary to find out exactly what they did say so I found a UK address for Ebay and sent them the standard SAR letter as found on these pages (obviously adapted for Ebay and her account details). This address WORKS for Ebay and is as follows:

 

Ebay (UK) Ltd

Hotham House,

1 Heron Square,

Richmond,

Surrey

TW9 1EJ

 

At around day 25 (rather late in the day) Ebay responded asking for more ID and I advised my Sister in Law to send passport and or driver licence data which she did even though I suspect that the provision of her name, address and Ebay username in the original request should have been sufficient.

 

About a week after the thirty days had expired she received two emails, one being a secured ZIP file containing her data and the other being the Password to extract the data.

 

I was able to extract the data and it is indeed a data dump from Ebay.

 

However, it does not contain any audio files. Records of phone calls are shown but the audio files are not provided.

 

I conclude that either Ebay is not retaining any recordings it makes or they have failed to provide the data.

 

If it is the latter then that is a second contravention of the Data Protection rules (the first being late provision of the data dump).

 

I believe the next move is to write to Ebay to advise them that they are in breach due to late delivery of the data and to ask them to confirm in writing that they do not hold any phone recordings, or if they do then to further advise them that they are in breach for not having provided them.    Probably a copy to the Data Commissioner would not go amiss either.

 

This post is for CAG member's interest to put on record here that UK Ebayers can write to the above address with a SAR and get a response. Also I welcome any comments and suggestions regarding the next move.

 

 

[dx100uk]

well ebay nor any debt collector can actually do anything

so one wonders if its worth you doing anything more??

[comebackjimmy]

Thanks DX100uk

 

Her account is still in use as she has paid the fee (several hundred pounds).  I want to get to the bottom of what Ebay said and get them to refund the fee if they did say so as she relisted incurring further fees on their advice.

 

I personally also think Ebay is too strong for its own good and I know of a lot of people who have come up against ebay and been unfairly treated.

 

I believe Ebay has broken the law by failing to provide the call recordings and this is leading to an inability to get proof( or otherwise) that they encouraged my Sister in Law to commit further expenses on the promise of a refund.

[ericsbrother]

do you know the recordings exist? many companies say that calls may be recorded but dont so so, they just want you to think that what you say is evidential if you abuse them.

[comebackjimmy]

14 minutes ago, ericsbrother said:

do you know the recordings exist? many companies say that calls may be recorded but dont so so, they just want you to think that what you say is evidential if you abuse them.

I have no idea if the calls exist.

 

If I was to take a guess then I would say they do exist as the tech to do so is very easy, but I really don't know.