You Have to Watch Your Own Back – Part II – eBay/PayPal Accomplices to Fraud?

Let me outline the scenario:

I bid on eBay for a TDR (a piece of expensive electronics test gear) from a seller with excellent ratings and recent successfully transactions.
I win and arrange to pay via eBay’s PayPal service, which I have funded by a MasterCard.
The Payment goes through.

Then….. nothing. No TDR, no further communication from the seller… simply nothing.

So I track down the seller to find that the phone number is dead and that the “real” address of the seller is different than the eBay/PayPal addresses.

I file an eBay and a PayPal complaint and request either the product (yeah, not likely) or a full refund.

To shorten the story, after much gyration and after PayPal and eBay enforced waiting periods, I get a small “chump change” refund, less a $35 PayPal recovery fee, to my PayPal account.

And PayPal refuses to provide me enough information to privately pursue the crook, claiming privacy reasons.

So no TDR and over $400 lost on what I’ve since learned was a lucky partial fund recovery.

And both eBay and and PayPal will not provide a pinch of information.

Unique experience of bad luck?

Hardly.

The eBay/PayPal team is solidly NOT on a Buyer’s Team. In many ways they have defined a system that creates a situation where they are accomplices to fraud.

Peeved and ready to just move along, I never think of filing a claim with MasterCard or in Wisconsin Small Claims court. Yet I would have likely succeeded in obtaining the information I needed and a judgement. Perfecting that judgement, unless payable by eBay, PayPal or MasterCard would be unlikely, but at least I would have broken their wall of silence.

Check out the PayPal horror websites – http://paypalsucks.com/ is a good start.

Strange as it might seem almost all the buyer protection I should have had funding the purchase by MasterCard was withered by having used PayPal as an intermediary.

Even their highly touted “Buyer’s Protection” is limited to the funds they recover, less a healthy fee.

Did I mention that my PayPal account was froze while they investigated the fraudulent seller?

Click on the Cartoon for a Full Sized version

After all this I really wonder if PayPal and eBay are worth the bother?

I maintain both PayPal and eBay accounts, but have largely stopped using them after this experience.

Buyer beware.

73

Steve