More like they got sick of dealing with people who were getting phished. I have the email address of different providers, and even though my eBay account goes to my personal email (my name, not my internet nickname), I get literally dozens of phishing attempts a week. People just pull the "bonechilling" part out, and send it to hotmail.com, yahoo.com, etc.

Remember, eBay also owns PayPal, so every time someone is suckered into turning over their name and password to a dummy website, it's their problem.