PayPal account locked out after fraudulent sale

EmeraldEmissary
Contributor
Contributor
The title of this post doesn’t even begin to relay all the information I have for the community. I’m honestly looking for some advice or words of warning to other people who may have made the same mistake in the past. Here goes. So, in January of 2017 I sold an iPad on eBay. I’ve been a seller there for about 6 years and have 100% positive feedback. Anyways, this sale goes through just like normal without so much as a hiccup. I get the payment and send off the item. I even throw in a little refund because the buyer gave me too much for shipping. After it was all said and done with the total I got to keep was about $350.00. I spend the money as per usual and go about my week. Around two weeks later is when the proverbial “IT” hits the fan. I receive an email from PayPal saying that a chargeback was issued to my account and I need to contact them ASAP. I do this. Come to find out the person who purchased my iPad had stolen another persons checking account information to pay for it. So this is what happened. The money from the sale of the iPad (which as I said earlier I already spent) was charged back on me and given to person who’s bank information was stolen. She gets her $426 and some odd change (price before fees) back. Ok, that’s fine, I understand. She was stolen from. This action taken by PayPal puts my PayPal account in the negative though so I call up PayPal to try and resolve the matter on my end. After hours and hours on the phone with many different customer reps over the span of about a week I’m finally told that nothing can be done for me. Here’s why. They have no way of proving that the item I sold was delivered to a buyer because the one time my dumb self chucks a tracking number this happens. Basically they said there’s no way for them to tell if an actual item was sold so they can’t help me. This leaves me essentially $800 in the hole because now PayPal is saying I owe them $426 for the chargeback and whoever “bought” the iPad I sold got it for free. I have a big problem with this at first. A few months go by and I don’t hear anything on the matter. Then the phone calls start poring in. PayPal decided to hand my account off to debt collectors for, you guessed it, collection. I tell them all this exact story and at the end I say that they can pretty much never expect their money because in this situation I’m the only one who’s been punished. Then a few more months go by and the letters start coming in. Those I ignore as well. Eventually enough time goes by and I start to think less and less about it until finally I’m at the point where I just don’t care anymore. Until this week. I decide to try and start selling on eBay again. I made a new PayPal account and everything just to find out in the end that I can’t really do that. You see, PayPal will let you make as many accounts as you want, the catch however is that, if you have an old account locked out because something similar has happened to you, your kinda up a certain creek without a paddle. Any old payment methods you have linked to the old account can’t be used with your new one without unlinking them. So, my dilemma is such. Do I break down and pay PayPal the money I morally don’t think I owe them or do I just leave the world of internet selling altogether. I know this story was long winded and I thank all of you who finished to the end. I always try to make my first world problems enjoyable to other people.
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