Community member Michael Boettcher wrote to us to tell us about his experience of Ebay problems when buying iLok licences.

The story begins when Michael received this email from PACE/iLok.

A recent audit of our records discovered that one or more license deposits were made to your iLok account with the User ID: xxxx by mistake. These deposits were not made by the software publisher, but were made by the iLok server when it saw your iLok and didn’t recognize the licenses on the iLok as licenses that already existed in your account. Licenses that were deposited in error to a different iLok account and then resold to you by another iLok user were also discovered in this audit.

We’ve corrected the problem that caused these duplicate license deposits, and as part of the clean up, the duplicate licenses are now set to be returned.

The following licenses that were deposited in error were removed from your account: Eventide, Inc. Anthology 2.01

Our records indicate that one or more of the licenses were purchased from another ilok.com user. Please contact the seller of each license if you wish to obtain a refund. You can find the seller’s name and other information in the email we sent to you on the transfer date. You may also try to seek a refund through any 3rd party broker, such as eBay or PayPal. Please do not contact ilok.com support; unfortunately they will not be able to assist you.

Attempting Contact With The Seller

As you can imagine Michael was alarmed by this so he contacted the Ebay seller. He sent him 4 emails, and this is his final one….

Dear Ivan xxxx, unfortunately you did not reply to my last email. As you surely know, you sold me a fake license (duplicate) which was deleted by iLok 2 weeks ago, please give me my money back until the end of next week, otherwise I have to follow this issue up due to fraud. You transferred the invalid license from the account X on 2013-10-10 The ilok tracking number is 95491432 The PayPal transaction code was xxxx. Please transfer the amount of EUR 431,43 until Friday May 9 2014 to my PayPal account xxxx.

If you have questions, please contact me directly. Best regards, Michael.

Michael continues;

His real name is Ivan xxxx – according to his PayPal account. His eBay name was darlock.core when I bought the license. But he changed his name to core.studio on April 28th. As you can see in his feedback list, I am not the only guy who has problems with the licenses he sold. Other users have reported similar issues

Eventide Help Solve The Problem

Michael reached out to Eventide for help;

However, I contacted Eventide and reported this problem to them, they offered me a new license which I bought for $499 (very nice). I like the Anthology II bundle very much, I use it in every template. Unfortunately iLok did not even warn me, before they removed this license, although the iLok is covered by ZDT, disappointing. As iLok originally duplicated this license due to a bug, it would have been fair, if they had resolved this issue in cooperation with the plug-in manufacturer (in my case Eventide), instead of just deleting it.

Ebay iLok Licence Purchase Issues - Our Advice

We have spoken several times about the dangers of buying used iLok assets on eBay, it’s not always a problem and in many cases you can grab a bargain or indeed get licences such as Pro Tools HD software, all of which are legitimate. However always check the seller feedback and look for any possible issues you may have.

In particular take time to read the seller feedback fully, often people will give great feedback on the day of purchase only to discover the issue weeks later, in this case reading the follow up comments reveals the whole story. Ebay really need to work harder to offer buyer protection, as you will see from this example the seller has maintained his perfect feedback score despite several follow up comments raising issues about the transactions.

We have removed key personal information to respect privacy. If you are the person named in Michael’s story and feel you have been misrepresented then please get in touch and we will happily print your side of the story.