I never buy electronics on eBay but I wanted an Intel Mac so I could run bootcamp. Most big box retailers cleared out their inventory so I didn't have a choice.
The seller offered to take it back for a full refund. I don't think he did this knowingly. A lot of people buy things wholesale and sometimes they don't even know what they're buying. Products come in pallets as lots and people sell these online - it's called
pallet flipping:
Looking at his transactions, that's what he seems to be doing - buying new and used computers and parts wholesale and flipping them on eBay. So, I don't think it was stolen. And Apple confirmed this with the serial number not being blacklisted.
I followed this person's lead:
https://apple.stackexchange.com/que...ok-pro-is-forcing-me-to-use-remote-management and reached out to a few Netflix IT workers on Linkedin. One responded and is checking with security to find out the status of the computer. This seems to be quite common - IT departments get rid of inventory and sometimes they don't "disown" / deregister them from Apple's MDM servers.
But rather than wait for who knows how long, I'm just going to return the computer.