How I blocked an ebay seller in my apartment building for 10 days

Image via CrunchBase

Ebay UK was offering spectacular deals for everyone during this weekend. I often get emails about this kinds of deals, but this one was different. I always have a fascination about fancy watches. I was just browsing and thinking that, A promotion makes us rush and buy things which we don’t need. I already have two watches, even I am trying to buy a new one, just because they are 64% cheap than their original price.

Ebay Spectacular Weekend

Among many other deals, I found a CASIO watch, which blew my mind. The £50 watch was being offered at £17.99 only. Including postage, two watches was supposed to cost about £50.99. I was actually planning to buy one for myself and another for a gift.

CASIO GENTS DIGITAL WATCH AE-1000WD-1AVEF

Ebay was also telling that, save 5% when you shop more than £150. So, I was telling my friends to buy things, so that the combined order exceeds £150. So, my roommate ordered a £110 SEIKO watch for his father.

SEIKO GENTS KINETIC WATCH SKA523P1

Both of the orders were from the same seller called Watch Warehouse UK.

When I proceeded to checkout, I saw that I am being charged only £110. First I thought it is a discount, but later I understood that it was not a discount, rather the price of the watch which my roommate ordered. I thought, Okay, may be they are charging one by one. So, I paid for it and went for paying my items. And i was surprised to see an error message, saying that, I am not allowed to buy that item, as it is from the same seller.

One purchase per deal

So, it turned out to be one purchase per deal. As I have already bought something from the seller, I couldn’t buy anything else from him now.

I was thinking of other alternatives, creating a new ebay account, paying with a different card bla bla. As the promotion was ending in about 45 minutes, I hurried to skype and called one of my friends, living in the same building, to buy the watch for me with his ebay account, and I will pay him personally later. He gave me his ebay username and password as he was little bit busy at this moment and it was an emergency situation.

I logged in with his ebay credentials, but saw the same stupid error message. 😦

I called him again, and insisted him to pause his work and buy it for me, I became angry and desperate. So, he logged on to Ebay from his computer to buy it from his account. And……. guess what?

SAME FUCKING ERROR MESSAGE!

So, I understood they are tracking IP addresses. The internet is provided to our building by TELE2. So, may be they have the same gateway IP (or may be the same public IP for every TELE2 subscribers in my neighborhood).

I also found out later that, they have mentioned about this policy on the banner, but with a very small font. Take a closer look again.

Ebay Spectacular Weekend

Somebody told me, the smaller is the font, the bigger is its importance. Its very true.

So, technically speaking, none of the other people from my building (or the neighborhood?) could purchase anything from that ebay seller called Watchwarehouse UK,  for the next 10 days. In other words, this is how I blocked that Ebay seller for the next 10 days to sell anything to anyone of my building. I blame Ebay for their poor policy based on just public ip addresses.

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