ebay in india also has no email based verification and can use phone only based verification because users are actually more likely to have a phone # and only u

ebay in india also has no email based verification and can use phone only based verification because users are actually more likely to have a phone # and only use sms than any email or chat app. A person from india used my mom's email address (a us resident/citizen) to sign up and purchase men's underwear from ebay.in (with no email verification). She had never signed up for an ebay account. I took over the ebay account and after speaking with an ebay rep it seems there was no way to even convert the ebay indian account to an ebay US account. Customer support in the US didn't even think it was possible to sign up for an account without a valid email and thought her email was hacked (which it wasn't!). Unfortunately all they could do is offer to disable the account forever. So now if she ever actually does want to use ebay she'll have to use an address like foo+ebay@gmail.com or intersperse her addr with dots assuming ebay allows it. I did email ebay's security disclosure team and I only got a reply saying that they would look into it. For some added fun and since I was pissed for all this wasted time (figuring out what exactly happened, if my mom's email was hacked or not because I was very confused initially about not seeing an email verification email from ebay), I call the guy in india and asked if he had ordered some chaddi's, he said yes, freaked out and hung up the phone. So yes the moral of the story is companies, PLEASE VERIFY YOUR USERS' email, or if you don't then don't associate that email address with the account and only do business with that user through SMS.