Fraudulent paypal payment

pritam_johal

A while ago I sold a phone on ebay. The guy paid me using paypal and came to collect the phone. A month later I had an email from paypal saying that they had seized funds in my account. They refunded the money to the buyer and are now demanding the money from me!!

The buyer did leave feedback for me saying that he was happy with the phone.

Where do I stand with this? Any help would be appreciated.

RACHIE77

eeek! (sorry thats not helpful but its all that I could think of!! what a mare!)

p.s welcome to MSE!

beachbeth

This is really worrying. How could the buyer do this? I think you should ring Paypal (their number is on their website) and talk to them personally about it. Perhaps the buyer has lied to them about the phone. If you are in the right then maybe Paypal will take the funds back off the buyer? I hope you get this sorted.

mrwibble

Sorry but my understanding is that unless you have on-line proof that the buyer received the item you will have to take the charge-back on the chin.

Paypal at its finest ! Don't bother trying to argue it as they are a Kafkaesque organisation without any corporate sense of reason. They will follow the rules and since you (probably) won't have any suitable proof of receipt your arguments will be rejected - learn and move on - otherwise you will just be bashing your head against a wall for months.

The moral of the story is to never accept Paypal for items over your confidence limit (mine is £500 yours may be higher or lower) and do bank transfer / NoChex / cash for anything over it (or under for mobile phones / laptops / anything with an Apple logo.

You can use a courier service with an on-line signature (I do for anything over £75) but remember chargebacks can be for "significantly not as described" (which can mean anything from a genuine mistake to the buyer swapping out your good bits for his broken ones) which means Paypal asks them (once they have nabbed your cash) to "kindly send it back - pretty please" - no real mechanism for assuring they actually do !!

At least with a proper credit card merchant account you can fight chargebacks with reasonable people open to persuasion - Paypal is well ... Paypal. I assume 10% of my profits will be snaffled by bad debts via fraudulent chargebacks of one type or another - it eases my frustration.

jockettuk

sounds like even if someone comes to your home to collect you should still get a receipt.. get them to sign saying they have collected it ...

Matt83UK_2

You're screwed, you need to have proof of postage, I doubt even if you got someone to sign on collection they'd accept it, like someone else said they have strict rules and the tubbies you speak it follow them regiliously. Unfortunately I think this is a live and learn lesson, if collection insist on cash or bank transfer only (after verified funds), always make sure the buyer has positive feedback, and if you suspect any nigerian-style fraud (such as offers of western union payment, paypal then collection, a credit card registered to someone else etc..) then cancel the bid. Was the paypal address the same as his ebay account? Chances are it was filled using a stolen credit card, or he used someone elses paypal account (notice the huge amount of ebay/paypal scam emails going about at the moment). Do you have the guys postal address? Perhaps make some style of threat (careful though) and/or contact the police.

Also if you see his ebay ID selling the same phone make sure you whack a ridiciously high bid on it.

Hintza

What correspondence have you had with Paypal in the run up to seizing the money?

Call him and see what he has to say!

If no luck, don't get mean just get even!!

pritam_johal

Pay pals reason was that the account user didn't know anything about the payment. The guy that bought the phone left feedback for me saying that he has received the phone. He bought a few more items including a car!! and the ceased to use his account.

Pay pal were no help what so ever, all they suggested was that I go to the police.

Matt83UK_2

He bought a few more items including a car

You'll probably find that will be chargeback soon. If the chargeback is orginating from the credit card used to fill the Paypal account then it will take a while to filter down to you.

richto

pritam_johal wrote:

A while ago I sold a phone on ebay. The guy paid me using paypal and came to collect the phone. A month later I had an email from paypal saying that they had seized funds in my account. They refunded the money to the buyer and are now demanding the money from me!!

The buyer did leave feedback for me saying that he was happy with the phone.

Where do I stand with this? Any help would be appreciated.

Your only option is to take the buyer to the small claims court and hope the same person turns up who you sold it to. As he picked it up, it shouldnt be too far away to visit his local court if it gets that far.

Normally just serving the documents is enough. Make sure you had some witnesses to the purchase...

What you should have done is posted him a brick as soon as the paypal dispute was opened and sent them proof of postage.