Controversies and criticism




Common eBay criticisms involve the policy of requiring the use of PayPal for payments and concerns over fraud, forgeries and intellectual property violations in auction items.citation needed There are also issues of how negative feedback after an auction can offset the benefits of using eBay as a trading platform.citation needed eBay has been criticized for not paying UK taxes: the Sunday Times reported in October 2012 that eBay paid only £1.2m in tax on sales of over £800m.

2014 security breach

On May 21, 2014, the company revealed that the consumer database of usernames, passwords, phone numbers, and physical addresses had been breached between late February and early March. Users were advised to change their passwords; to expedite this, a "change password" feature was added to profiles of users who had not yet done so. The Syrian Electronic Army took responsibility for the attack. The SEA said that even though the hack revealed millions of users' banking details to them, they would not misuse the data. They had replaced the front pages of the websites with their own logo, called "Defacing" in technical terms. The hack caused eBay's share price to crash in intra-day trade as a result of the breach of security.

Stalking scandal

A cyberstalking and harassment campaign conducted in 2019 against an online newsletter led to charges made public in 2020 against seven members of eBay's global security team, as well as arrests of two of those charged. Following the publication of an article in online newsletter EcommerceBytes about eBay's litigation against Amazon, CEO Devin Wenig texted an EBay communications executive, saying, "If you are ever going to take an ECommerceBytes writer down... now is the time." Thereafter, a team of EBay employees launched a cyberstalking and harassment campaign against the newsletter's authors. Wenig, the company's CEO at the time of the harassment campaign, has not been not charged.

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