Taiwan

eBay Suspension: It wasn’t me, I didn’t do it…!

Posted by

1

For those of you who remember my situation with eBay, they finally answered my email, after I reposted my email through the user center (again).

Bloggers Unite - Blog Action Day

Last month, I was suspended from using eBay for no apparent reason, with a somewhat abrupt email from eBay and poor help from their customer *dis*service center.

Here’s the follow up email I got, spelling and grammar mistakes are theirs, not mine:

Hello,

Thank you for taking the time to write to eBay. I am happy to assist you further.

Recently, we have detected some Taiwan accounts have the risk of taking by the third party. In order to protect the personal information of users and maintain those accounts safty, we have suspended your account.

You could choose:

1. Please reply this mail for account closure (related personal information will be deleted at the same time)

2. Please provide us scanned or digital picture of your Identity Card in attachment format to: hkappeal@ebay.com (Note: Please control the size of attachment within 100K and save it as .jpg format). Our staff will reply you within 48 to 120 hours from receipt of the requested information.

3. Needn’t reply this mail, this suspension account can’t be used till the process of option2 has been completed.Your persional information is safe with the suspension status.

Sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused, thank you for the understanding!

Thank you for your interest in helping to keep eBay Hong Kong a fun and safe place to trade!

For further contact, please reply this email with the original text. Thank you!

Regards,

eBay Hong Kong Customer Support

I appreciate the long answer, and the fact that the person writing it really tried to help. But still, I wonder why I am being found guilty first then being expected to prove my innocence. It seems odd.

I didn’t do anything wrong, but I have to appeal, and have my appeal judged. Wouldn’t it be better PR to find another way to get this information such as advising us that all accounts need to be ‘upgraded’ (with additional services), but to upgrade you need to ‘verify’ who you are. Isn’t that what Paypal does?

I still can’t decide if I should bother or not. Oh, and scanning my ID and shipping it via email is REALLY secure, isn’t it? I might as well just type my credit card number in the email, too. Haven’t they heard of identity theft?

September Credit Card Spending: Why no cashback spending?

Posted by

2

As credit cards become much more prevalent than before, we are finding that there are ways to use credit cards that were not possible just one or two years ago: travelling on the subway in Taipei, buying a cup of coffee (yes, I did that!), paying for doctor’s fees, paying regular bills, fees or memberships, and so on. Some of the ways get quite ridiculous, so it’s getting much harder to resist the swipe and forget reaction of credit card users!

Of course, online it’s possible to spend a lot of money using your credit card. You don’t have to worry about it till MUCH later. Seems ironic that we are actually using our own personal credit cards MUCH LESS than before, even though it’s easier to find ways to use them.

The September Credit Card statement arrived this week, and I have just paid it! So, you’re asking what was on it? Actually, the total this month was only half of last month’s, or NT$6300, a little over US$200.

So how did we rack up that NT$6300 in charges? Well, there was the usual $2000 insurance charge, a telephone charge for my mobile phone, and I recently purchased an annual subscription to EMusic.com, which cost about $3300. Somehow, though going to several nice restaurants, buying clothes, gasoline, books, and other knick-knacks, we managed to avoid swiping for almost all of these things in September.

If you’re really shrewd, though, it is possible to earn quite a bit of interest, or at least reduce your interest payments through balance transfers and through cash back credit cards which credit money to your account everytime you spend.

It seems dumb for me not to charge things to credit cards, when some cards are begging payments to be made through them, and offer 3% or 4% cashback. Now that would be a nice payment of nearly $189 or more on the money I spent! It’s getting harder to argue against using a credit card in those cases.

Typhoon Weather: October 5th and 6th.

Posted by

I’m used to posting daily updates on this website, but unfortunately on October 5th~6th, Taiwan is facing a large and powerful Typhoon (or Tropical Storm) … It has heavy winds and rains, so it’s possible that my DSL connection to InvestorBlogger may be lost for a few days. We already have had most things canceled for the day, and possibly Sunday, too. One of the local coffee shops was open just downstairs from my apartment. I slipped down to buy a coffee, and got completely drenched in just a few minutes… That’s how heavy the rain is.

While I have lost my camera, I couldn’t make any typhoon movies, I’ll leave you with this video: So if you aren’t getting new posts, please bear with me and check out my past posts in the archive. Or search for your posts that might interest you, such as making money, etc.

The general Taiwan weather situation.

The second link didn’t load for me, but the first worked beautifully: http://www.goes.noaa.gov/sohemi/sohemiloops/shirgmscolw.html http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/tropic/real-time/visir/westpac/visirjava17W.html

For local weather, you can’t do better than… http://www.cwb.gov.tw/V5e/typhoon/ty.htm I’ll update the weather on this post. If I can, I’ll keep posting other stuff, too.

Best Wishes Kenneth