Is “eBay Live Chat” a chatbot?
I tried registering on eBay today. Their help pages say that there are two ways to verify an account — either credit card (I don’t have any) or certain email address. First I tried my gmail account, which obviously didn’t work. The next step was an email on the domain tasuki.org, which I own (it is easily possible to verify that by a whois search).
That didn’t work either, so I decided to contact eBay Live Chat for help:
| Vit Brunner | hello |
| Vit Brunner | I want to register |
| Marnie B. | I’d be glad to assist you on that! |
| Vit Brunner | I don’t have a credit card, I have a paypal though |
| Vit Brunner | and I wonder what kind of email address I have to enter so that it verifies me |
| Vit Brunner | I tried a gmail address, which didn’t work, then I tried address on my domain that I own, didn’t work either  |
| Vit Brunner | I have a school address, but I’d prefer not to leak the information out |
| Vit Brunner | (I don’t want my school to have any info about my ebay account, that is) |
| Marnie B. | I’m sorry to hear of the trouble. Let me see what I can do on my end. |
| Vit Brunner | could you tell me what kind of email is enough to verify me? |
| Marnie B. | Thanks for asking. What I can suggest you to use is your work email or paid email address if you have one. |
| Vit Brunner | well, the email address on my own domain is not enough? |
| Vit Brunner | I think that is a paid email address  |
| Vit Brunner | and the owner info for that domain is publicly available |
| Vit Brunner | but it still asked me for credit card information |
| Vit Brunner | the domain is tasuki.org, if it helps you |
| Marnie B. | I see. Actually paid email address can be use as an alternative because it may reduce the chance of being asked for a credit card… |
| Vit Brunner | a whois search shows that tasuki.org is indeed owned by me |
| Vit Brunner | isn’t that enough to verify me? |
| Marnie B. | But if you’re still being asked for it, I believe you really have to enter those information. But you can try your school email if you want. |
| Vit Brunner | how is it decided which email is good enough? |
| Marnie B. | Honestly I’m not sure because our system is the one who verifies the email address. |
| Marnie B. | You would only know if you won’t be asked for a credit cared. |
| Marnie B. | *credit card |
| Vit Brunner | sigh… |
| Marnie B. | I appreciate your interest in doing business with us. |
| Vit Brunner | so I am going to try my various random email addresses… but I think it’s pretty strange that my email address on a domain which I apparently own is not good enough |
| Vit Brunner | that’s actually about the best verification you can get |
The rest of the chat sadly got lost because the chat was ended by Marnie B. which caused the window to close suddenly. Anyway, I think this is enough to see what the conversation looked like. The answers were either rather general or completely off. The typo and its correction is a bit suspicious though — would they really create a bot this sneaky? To be sincere, I am not sure.
I tried it once more and got to talk with Joy D. That was quite tiring, as Joy D obviously didn’t understand my problem with verification very well and kept insisting on me trying a different browser (I use firefox and Joy D said I should try Internet Explorer). This is exactly what bots do — when they don’t know, they switch to a different topic. On the other hand, Joy D seemed a bit too confused to be a bot. So, I really don’t know.
I hope I persuaded you to try eBay Live Chat yourself, please share your experience!
