Hi! I am a very long time lurker on the Dis. I never post because I generally am a shy, keep to my self person. However, this time, I wanted to post to let everyone know of a situation that I am going through and hope it doesn't happen to someone else. I have been churning for a while, very small amounts like $100 a week. I have never received ebay bucks even though I have been with ebay since 1999. To churn through ebay I simply wait for coupons or use the normal 2x.
Almost two weeks ago, ebay had a flash coupon of $15 off $75 for just a few hours. I had purchased an ebay GC from Target earlier in the week so I was using that as my payment along with the coupon, for a $100 Target GC through GCM. When I entered the ebay GC number, I verified it was for $100 and hit the button to process the transaction. I got an error message instead saying they couldn't process the transaction. I tried again but this time i saw my ebay GC only had $12.01 remaining. I thought the first transaction must have gone through. An hour later, I never received any confirmation that the transaction was processed so I checked my ebay and there was nothing there. I also checked Paypal and there was no transaction there either. I looked up my gift card balance on ebay and found it was only $12.01. So ebay took the money but never processed the order. I immediately called ebay who transferred me around and they told me I had to call Paypal. I called Paypal and spoke with a product specialist who saw that I didn't have any transaction that day nor was the gift card in the system as being tied to my account. Paypal even asked why I was calling them, that it was an ebay issue. The man was very nice and called ebay to find out what the problem was. He told me that ebay said they put a hold on funds and when it doesn't process it goes back to the gift card. I should have my money within the hour. By this time, I missed out on using the $15 off coupon because I was on the phone for hours. The next day, the gift card balance was unchanged. I called Paypal again who told me it was an ebay issue since it didn't appear tied to my account. They were nice enough to file a service request to look into the issue for me though. I then called ebay who told me I had to wait 36-72 hours. Each phone call lasted over an hour with multiple transfers to different departments and service members and I had to go through the whole thing each time. I waited 4 days and still did not have the money returned so I again called ebay. After 2 hours on the phone and multiple transfers, I was told it was reported on my account and would be another 36-72 hours to fix! I asked for a supervisor and waited on hold for 75 minutes. Then the original person came back on the line and told me the supervisor was on a call and would call me back within the hour. That call never came. I called ebay again the next day and asked for a supervisor. I was disconnected three different times! At this point I was very aggravated so I waited until today to call again. I have been on the phone for 2 1/2 hours so far and still waiting. I have been transferred to multiple supervisors and now I am speaking with "upper management". I am being told that there is an ongoing issue with ebay gift cards. Most notably egift cards. They tell me this same situation has been happening for 2-3 weeks and ebay doesn't know how to fix it. She tells me they want to "try to refund everyone's money but they don't know if they can!!" Needless to say I find this unacceptable and told her so but she says there is nothing they can do, it's a known problem. She has looked thoroughly into my account and called Paypal and had them look into my account and they can see the card was never used and I didn't have any transactions that day or any day around it. But, they cannot refund the money. I told her I verified the amount on the egift card I purchased and saw it on the screen when I tried to use it. Yet ebay stands by the claim that there is nothing they can do and she recommends not using egift cards! I have no idea what to do at this point. She is telling me that there will be no refund issued. She refused to transfer me to anyone else because "there is noone else to speak with". Frustrated can't even describe how I feel. Thankfully it was only a small amount.
I just wanted to warn anyone using egift cards. Mine was a small dollar amount but I know there are people who are using much larger amounts and I hope this does not happen to anyone else!
