Last autumn I bought something and paid for it. The seller then contacted me to apologize and explain that the item had sold out, so refunded me and that was that.
I subsequently put on a few parts to sell, which sold, and I was paid, and that was that.
Then I start getting emails from ebay saying that I owed them money - I called them as I could not see what was due to them. Turned out their system had got screwed up with the repayment from the item that was refunded to me. I was told it would take over a month to straighten it out at their end, and update the system (seems a bit long in this day and age but hey ho). So that was that.
During January I started getting calls from a company called Akinika. They would phone me and say this is Akinika on behalf of ebay, and start asking for my personal details. My reply; "I have no idea what this is about, or who you are, before I give out my personal details, can you tell me who you are, or what this is about?" - their reply - please confirm your details so we can tell you...... the call ended fairly quickly. My work has been very busy in the past month so I did not really have time to look into this (and thought is was some scam anyway).
This morning I had time to call ebay and find out what it's about. They told me that following their mix up with the refund to me, they had suspended my automatic payment method, and that I had incurred some seller fees (totaling £11) from the items I had sold. Those fees were outstanding and they had passed it to their debt collections department - Akinika. I told them I did not dispute that I owed £11 and am happy to settle that, but they had created the mess, and I was very unhappy about being harassed by a random company who would not tell me why they were calling. They were very apologetic and have sorted it out, but my god, what a PITA to sort out for the sake of some cock ups on their part.
Moral of the story - give ebay a wide berth unless you really have to, and stick with SE classifieds - that is much easier!
