This happened to me about 5 years ago on ebay when selling an iPhone. I was an eBay member since 1999, 100% positive feedback, occasional seller (about once a month). I sold a perfectly fine iPhone, buyer with no feedback history complains to eBay he never received the phone despite tracking showing it was delivered. He also leaves me negative feedback (in broken English). eBay sided with the buyer immediately and attempted to withdraw the money out of my paypal account which I'd fortunately already withdrawn. They demanded for over a year that I pay them the money they claim I owe them or they'd destroy my credit. Fuck eBay, fuck PayPal, terrible companies that should have gone out of business long ago.
When World of Warcraft was released, I had the same thing happen to me. It was a hot item and my local retailer happened to have it on the shelves, so I bought 10 extra copies and sold the CD keys on ebay for about 3x retail pricing. Almost half of the keys I sold were allegedly bought from Paypal customers who "had their accounts hacked", so ebay withdrew the money from my account and refunded it to the buyers leaving me without merchandise or money.
> bought 10 extra copies and sold the CD keys on ebay for about 3x retail pricing
> ebay withdrew the money from my account and refunded it to the buyers
Wicked karma :)
When Nexus 4 was launched, I ended up with multiple devices (automated parallel purchases). It gave a lot of joy to sell them at cost (on craigslist) rather than cancel my purchase or pocket the premium they could've fetched.
I think of these practices as "Hoarding" & "Price Gouging" rather than business sense. More like taking advantage of people without adding any value to the trade.
Well, kingnohthing did nothing wrong and then got scammed, and lost plenty of legitimate arbitrage profit. Yes, eBay is lazy and doesn't check up who's it is siding with.
It happens as a buyer, I buy expensive antique glass and have more than once had to fight with ebay to have the purchase refunded because it was not as advertised, or worse having a seller ship a piece that was previously broken and then turn around and try to claim it was the post office and defraud them.
so I understand paypal's and ebay's stance
1. They are up against CC companies who will side with their customer
2. A market suspected of selling fraudulent goods fails quickly
3. Sellers enter the agreement knowing full well there is a risk of a bad buyer and they will lose in the dispute.
I've always wondered: how much overhead is introduced by eBay proxying package deliveries? Or does there exist a "delivery escrow" type service that can be trusted and audited somehow? If not, does this type of service have value?
One interesting niche that eBay is considered both great and terrible for is watch buying. There are often descriptions that note "the watch in the picture is the watch you receive!" -- which is hilarious -- and "no buyers with less than n feedback" etc. It's considered a minefield for myriad reasons, and it's kind of a necessary evil if you want affordable vintage pieces or the increasingly rare "barn find" type of watch. But there is not an insurer or delivery proxy that I know of. On Craigslist, a lot of this is mitigated via the local nature of it, e.g. I will only buy your watch if you meet me at a Rolex dealer and get it authenticated on the spot before hand off.
I have no love for eBay or Paypal, but what should they do in these sorts of situation? If buyer claims they send the product and seller claims they didn't, is there any good way of handling the dispute that doesn't have the potential for screwing over whichever party is innocent? Of course, they could have decided in your favour based on better feedback history, but that would have solved the problem for you, not all problems like this.
At the bare minimum, they should help. They don't. They can't because they don't have the capacity to, but that is no excuse to profit over a platform they themselves have built that is being openly utilized by criminals to scam people, of which they are completely aware, and only doing the bare minimum to continue to stay in business.
As for what could solve the actual problem, there is one solution that always works, and that is insurance. Based on the claims, including false claims (it doesn't really matter), a company can calculate the loss probability, and sell protection. It would be a form of seller protection insurance that would save you from various situations as long as you follow the guidelines.
Of course, mail swap fraud is incredibly stupid because the perp is accepting the package to do their deed, leaving a decent trail of evidence. Mail theft is also stupid because there are harsh laws in place that would make it so not worth it compared to other forms of theft. So both are fairly rare. But they do happen because there are no shortage of idiots.
Since filing a false police report is in itself a crime, the honest innocent victims should all be filing more police reports, and PayPal and eBay should act based on these. So if someone returned a brick, you could file a report, have PayPal confirm it, and get your money back. Everyone should help you along this process, and it should be made simple and fairly easy. They don't, and it isn't.
And if you're a victim of a false police report, then you should be compensated even more for your troubles. If we have red light cameras that automatically send us fines, there is no reason we couldn't build a system for transaction fraud that would automate much of the violations involved in commerce. The credit card chargeback system is an example of one such system which are all maintained by corporations for their users. I'd opt for a public one for the people.
Yep, I think the only defense against someone criticizing an unboxing video is to sit near your front door on the expected delivery day, recording device in hand and finger on the button, and as soon as you see/hear the delivery driver pulling up, start recording and don't stop until the device is unboxed. The sheer absurdity of anyone actually doing that is what works in the favor of scammers on both sides (buyers and sellers).
> The sheer absurdity of anyone actually doing that is what works in the favor of scammers on both sides (buyers and sellers).
Request shipping to post office, open package in post office while filling with smartphone. If you don't want to pay for a trusted retailed, you have to put in some work yourself.
No dice, you'd have to get specific permission from the Postmaster to record on the premises, otherwise video recording by the public for anything other than news media purposes is prohibited.
Another thing I do is only buy from and sell to people with 5+ years and 50+ transactions of feedback, and at least a few transactions at the same dollar value that I'll be doing with them.
People are so entitled. They want free guaranteed secure transactions without putting any effort into security. It's "Fuck Ebay" every time something goes wrong, and entitled complacency every time they get an awesome deal.
The seller is rightfully entitled in this case. eBay is not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts — they are charging the seller a fee for conducting a sale on their platform. Given the fee, the seller has the right to expect reasonable service.
Yes, and a high fee at that. Between ebay and paypal, you pay about 16% as the seller. They could easily take the hit in these kinds of scenarios (which are still pretty rare when considering the whole ecosystem) and still be very profitable while they improve their fraud detection methods, but instead they'd rather just collect their rent, do pretty much nothing, and let someone get screwed.
Yes, but I am permanently banned from using PayPal now. Which is fine for me, but since then I've pushed literally millions of dollars of revenue through Stripe which would have more than accounted for their 'loss' had they not been so idiotic about the whole thing. I'm sure I'd have integrated with PayPal by default since Stripe was still nascent back then, but thanks to PayPal I was forced to use a different option for my business.
