Stuck in an endless loop after Ebay blocked my account

[Deleted User]

I'm not expecting anyone to have a solution to this but maybe someone will get some enjoyment out of it. I recently decided to get back into selling on Ebay and listed an item using my old account that had been inactive for several years. Ebay immediately blocked my account and sent me an email saying they suspected the account had been compromised. This was incorrect and it was presumably just some automated security alert triggered by the inactivity on the account. In any case, I didn't click on anything in the email in case it was a phishing scam and went directly to Ebay to solve it.

This is where I became sucked into an endless loop of badly designed customer service procedures that is so convoluted I can only sum it up in a numbered list:

1. You cannot log into your account. When you try, it will just leave you stuck on the login page with a warning and you can't progress any further. This means you can't access any support directly, post messages on the community forum, reset your password, etc.
2. Eventually if you go to the help section (which requires deleting all your cookies or using incognito mode because Ebay keeps forcing you onto the unpassable login page) there's a page that gives you access to an online chat. I tried this and the first representative I spoke to told me it can only be unblocked over the phone and gave me a link to a page for Ebay to call me that only allows you to input a US or Canada number, which is useless as I'm in the UK.
3. I tried again and this time the representative gave me a link to a new page on the UK site and told me to click on a non-existent "call us" link that isn't actually on the page. By the time I found out their instructions were useless they had logged off. 
4. I tried again and this time the online chat gave me a direct link to a "call us" page. I clicked on that and it took me to the login page again. So now I'm stuck in an endless loop where the only way to resolve the problem is to have them call me but I can't access the page to do that because you need to be logged in.

Now at this point I had wasted well over an hour and threw the towel in. I'm sure there is eventually some way to Google the number, find out how to call them, and no doubt jump through another fifteen hoops to sort it out, but for the sake of selling an old book for two quid, I couldn't justify continuing. I just wondered if anyone else has gone through this rigmarole and made it to the other side?

TripleH

Sorry no help to offer.

I have an issue where a buyer put an offer in for an item that the system accepted then realised they couldn't collect it.

I got a request to cancel which I clicked on and something went wrong.

I now can't cancel the item because its marked as cancelled but still shows as payment outstanding....

forgotmyname

You can phone without the pin but expect a lengthy wait and possibly going through several reps before finding someone

who has a clue what they are doing.

Website is biased to being logged in and some reps probably want one also. You have to keep trying.

custardy

What links/options are in the email?