Buyer paid with fraudulant card ... help please

yumzone · 19 November 2007 at 5:57PM

Hi there

If anybody can offer me any advice to my situation I would gratefully appreciate it.

I listed my laptop for sale on ebay http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=250183990173.

Last monday someone brought it buy now while I was away from home.
She got my personnal details from ebay and called me many times to find out when she could collect as she had paid for the item. She said she was local, so I said it would be no problem to collect on the monday night.

She did collect and laptop and i gave her £20 cash as she said she had paid for postage but infact she was collecting.

I thought fine all is good sold the laptop sent the money to my bank account which went in friday.

Today I get notified by paypal that they have put my account £500 in the red as they have claimed back the money as the buyer had paid on a fruadulant card.

They now want me to top up my account with £500 and are not offering any help with the fraudulanty obtained laptop.

They said call the police which I have done but they say they cant do much as it is paypal who let the card through even though it was fraudulant.

So now I owe paypal £500 which I dont want to give them as I would have no money for ny selling the laptop.

Does anybody know where I stand?

Can they go to my bank account and withdraw this money withoutme authorizing it?

Should they be liable as they took the dodgy card not me? what about the bank that issued the card shoul they not honour the payment.

help?

yummy

frivolous_fay · 19 November 2007 at 6:04PM

Oh dear... I wish you'd come here when you sold it

It's a really really bad idea to accept paypal on a collection item - even if the credit card payment HADN'T been fraudulent, you wouldn't have any proof that the buyer had ever received the item. Not only that, but the fraudulent buyer is geographically untraceable - they could have come from anywhere.

I would go to the police with any details for that buyer that you have. The problem is, they could be the details for the GENUINE account holder, and nothing to do with the scammer at all. But it couldn't hurt. Report the laptop as stolen - take the serial number.

Someone else may be along to advise how you can fight paypal and their debt collectors - it's not really my forte.

ormus · 19 November 2007 at 6:04PM

sorry but it aint looking good for you. inform the police now.
if you accept paypal, you only send item to a confirmed address.
and sent by a trackable system. ie special delivery.
never let the buyer collect except for cash on collection.

frivolous_fay · 19 November 2007 at 6:06PM

Here's some information on preventing paypal fraud:

http://forums.ebay.co.uk/thread.jspa?threadID=58159&tstart=0&mod=1068479610966

And some more:

http://forums.ebay.co.uk/thread.jspa?threadID=400058950&tstart=0&mod=1110979971222

jan03 · 19 November 2007 at 6:49PM

Poor you, I dont know what you have to do in this situation but I feel really sorry for you.

patriciaellen · 19 November 2007 at 7:17PM

Poor you indeed - this is a very bitter pill to swallow but I think you're on a hiding to nowhere with this. You've been had an Paypal won't offer you any support. Sorry but I think you'll just have to chalk it up to experience. I hope your laptop explodes into a thousand pieces and your horrible buyer gets what she deserves.

saintdan · 19 November 2007 at 8:05PM

I feel so sorry for you!! :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:

The same thing happened to me about 2 years ago. :mad:

I sold an item on ebay for about £200 & the buyer paid using paypal. I sent the item to the address (on his paypal account) by special delivery then about a month later I had £200 taken out of my paypal account & an email from Paypal saying that a stolen credit card had paid for my item.

Luckily for me (I thought) I still had the proof of posting special delivery & obtained proof of delivery & signature from Royal Mail.

After weeks of emails,faxes & phone calls I was told by paypal I was not entitled to get my money back. I was not told exactly why but received a standard email which is obviously sent to everyone with this problem & told to refer to the T&C's.

If you have reported it to the Police & Paypal just hope that someone pulls their finger out.

Good luck anyway!!

Dan

yumzone · 20 November 2007 at 3:17AM

Have reported it to the police they have given me an incedent number - what good that is i dont know?
The police man did say i should try and seek legal advise as paypal accepted payments for 2 other ebay sellers before they did me over ... so by then they should have realised something is a miss and stopped them from using the fraudulant card.
I cant belive how horrible people are

Dont know what to do next???

Bromley86 · 20 November 2007 at 8:54AM

Only new advice that I can give is ask on the eBay Community Q&A board as well. I'm surprised that PayPal can shaft you for the loss when it's their systems that should be verifying that the card payment was genuine. Best of luck

http://forums.ebay.co.uk/forum.jspa?forumID=7

soolin · 20 November 2007 at 9:18AM

Bromley86 wrote: »

Only new advice that I can give is ask on the eBay Community Q&A board as well. I'm surprised that PayPal can shaft you for the loss when it's their systems that should be verifying that the card payment was genuine. Best of luck

http://forums.ebay.co.uk/forum.jspa?forumID=7

I'm sorry but I;m going to sound terse here but this has happened due to a fundemental misunderstanding about how paypal works. Regardless of whether the card was fraudulent or not paypal require a tracked delivery proof for goods..so the OP has not only been scammed, they had left themselves completely vulnerable to a chargeback by not reading and/or understanding the paypal basic requirements. I like paypal and I often defend it on here but I must add a plea that no one uses it PLEASE unless they understand what they are doing.

Even if this goes to law and the OP can track down the person who collected it, which seems unlikely, the buyer only has to deny collecting the item and then what? Think this through logically how can the OP prove beyond doubt that this laptop was collected?

I am really becoming increasingly concerned about inexperienced or naive people being signed up for paypal without any requirement to understand it, Yet I can see no way round the problem. I'm sure if paypal required people to do a tutorial everyone would be up in arms about the 'nanny' system assuming they are too dim to work paypal..yet how else can we protect people? The system as it stands is correct, buyers must be protected as they rely 100% on the system to protec them and I'm sure none of us would want a system where a seller does not have to prove that the goods have reached the buyer..otherwise every scammer going would be claiming to have our signature on a a bit of paper 'proving' item was collected. So that leaves a system where a seller needs to protect themselves, and 99.9% of us do, but how do we protect the rest from themselves?

I'm sorry this post seems so bitter but at this time of year the scammers and thieves (and yes these people are criminals) are out in force looking for naive people to scam, and I can see no way of stopping them while people use paypal without any understanding of it. We can't get to these people to warn them, usually the firstthing we see on MSE is where it has already gone wrong, so what else can we do to protect newer sellers?

shellsuit · 20 November 2007 at 9:23AM

You didn't happen to make a note of the number she was calling you from did you??

Buyer paid with fraudulant card ... help please

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