Paypal asking to return item to an address that doesn't exsit

[KawaiiTikal]

So a while ago I bought a coat from a China seller on Ebay, I never received it after paying, and the seller was then kicked out of Ebay, I also received an e-mail from Ebay telling me the sale was cancelled and to not pay for the item. But it was too late, I had paid for it and now the seller is no longer a registered member of Ebay (he was obviously a scammer because before his account was closed, lots of people were complaining about scam in his feedback).

So I opened a case on Paypal, and the seller provided a tracking number. I then received a package with signature. I thought it was weird. I opened it and inside was a pair of NBA socks. I checked the tracking number and it was the same the seller provided. So in resume, when I opened the case, the seller decided to send socks with signature to defend himself. UGH. I was so mad. So I changed the case to item not as described and explained to paypal that the seller was a scammer and sent me socks instead of the coat.

Now Paypal sends me an e-mail saying

Please ship the item in the shape you received it to the seller at the
following address:
beijingshifengtaiquyouwaiyufangyuanxiaoqucaoqiaodonglu12haolou305men
beijing
   , 100068
China

I am sorry Paypal but this is not an address. I cannot ship to this, it's ridiculous. Can I have an employee look over this? How? I will not pay 10$ to send back a pair of socks with tracking, to an address that makes no sense. I only have 10 days to react or I won't get my refund, so please help. How can I contact someone so they realize this makes no sense at all? And why is Paypal asking me to return the item, when Ebay themselves closed the seller's account because his items were scams? (They sent me the MC015 message from loss prevention department, so why is it so complicated to just receive a refund if they know the seller is a scammer?? Please help me.

[TV_journalist]

Hello,

You have just fallen victim to a very common scam done daily at EBay via PayPal payments and PayPal policies help such scammers and puts the buyer at risk.

Our ongoing investigations show that the recourse in these cases is possible mostly if you have paid through a credit card.

In such cases, you can just call your credit card company for a chargeback AFTER you have filed the dispute with PayPal and send them that information with the fake address and they will issue a refund and PayPal will have to prove the validity of the charge. The bank processors will likely have seen these so many times with PayPal that they will not blink an eye in getting you the refund. The only side-effect is that PayPal may close or suspend your account but they make enough money from the commission from such scams from people who do not use a credit card or do not follow up that they may not bother with the few they have to refund.

The scam works like this:

1. A seller, in most cases from China, lists an item (typically in the $200-$400 range) for around $20-$30 dollars using either a stolen account or a pipeline of eBay accounts created with a steadily planted sales and feedback from other fake/real accounts to build a star rating. Such cultivated accounts are used to harvest a scam once and discarded. Some common items used for such sales include smart phones, tablets, brand name clothing and accerssories for which the value can be easily ascertained by the buyer.

2. There will always be some buyers who fall for this "too good to be true" scams, primarily because of the prominent Buyer Protection displayed by PayPal on that item which seems like a risk worth taking. After all, in the worst case, they get a refund if they do not get that item as promised, right?

3. The seller sells about 300-600 of these in that one sale with a delivery date about 3-5 weeks away. As soon as the sale of that item is done, he/she waits for a week and files a tracking number with PayPal and waits for that money from that sale either directly because of the cultivated account in good standing or via transfer to a valid account and cashes in. Just like with USPS, you can generate a valid tracking number in China long before you ship anything. Most buyers wait for 3-4 weeks before disputing the claim. Meanwhile, the seller has closed out that account in Ebay and moved on to another account.

4. The PayPal policies are that you must file a dispute within 45 days. Some people miss this window and both the scammer and PayPal make money from such cases.

5. If you file a dispute with PayPal for no delivery, PayPal responds with the tracking number provided. The scammer then ships a token item with that tracking number, typically a coin or a bead or some such trinket. Now you hav to wait for that item to arrive and PayPal will do nothing until then.

6. When you receive that item and assuming it is not past 45 days, you can file a dispute or change your previous dispute to item not as advertised. In response, PayPal sends an automated mail to you that says "after careful review", they have decided that you will get a refund but only after the item is received back by the seller. The address will be an invalid one which never gets caught in that "careful review" which is nothing more than an automated e-mail. This can happen either by the seller not having filed a valid address or in most cases, the Chinese characters provided by the seller not translating into the e-mail or the web site dispute history.

7. The scammer is depending on two things in the above case. First, if the buyer finds out that it costs almost as much to mail the item back with a registered and tracked number to China as the amount to be refunded, they may decide to just forget about it or try to take it up with PayPal which goes nowhere since the only choice PayPal gives is to provide the tracking number or cancel the dispute. This is why the item is usually priced around $20 to start with. Second, even if you were to mail it back, it most likely bounce as undeliverable and so the tracking will never show the item as delivered and you will not get your refund from PayPal. In both such cases, the scammer and PayPal make money.

8. There will be a few cases in which the refund can be obtained, either by using the credit card chargeback or by being persistent with PayPal using their help number (not the online process which is useless for such cases) and escalating it to the supervisor, etc. The scammers are depending on such cases being very small pocketing most of the money collected as profit and PayPal getting enough fees from such uncontested sales that a few refunds may provide very little incentive to change the system to prevent such scams in the first place.

So, my recommendation is to get to the dispute stage with PayPal where they give you the invalid address and send that information to your credit card company and dispute the charge (which can be easily done online at your bank) and almost always, you will get your refund back.

If you are not purchasing these through a credit card or you have a PayPal seller account that generates money, you should open another account for purchases only and use it only with a credit card and not make purchases in the other account.

[KawaiiTikal]

Thanks for the information. I did not pay by credit card so all I could do was try with what I had. I provided Paypal with a proof that the package was not accepted by the post office because the address they gave me was not a valid one, and all Paypal told me was that they had to close the case and could not refund me because I could not provide the correct information that the package was delivered and received by the seller. Completely and utterly ridiculous. It seems Paypal are in favor of the scammers, and do not care about their honest customers. They provided me with an invalid address from the seller, so they should be responsible.

[Buyorsell888]

Never buy online without using a credit card, not from any website for anything

Never buy from China on eBay, nothing will be as advertised. It does not matter that most of the world's name brand goods are made there. The workers do not have access to them to sell them cheap in ones and twos on eBay. They are all counterfeit dollar store junk.

[TV_journalist]

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@KawaiiTikal wrote:

Thanks for the information. I did not pay by credit card so all I could do was try with what I had. I provided Paypal with a proof that the package was not accepted by the post office because the address they gave me was not a valid one, and all Paypal told me was that they had to close the case and could not refund me because I could not provide the correct information that the package was delivered and received by the seller. Completely and utterly ridiculous. It seems Paypal are in favor of the scammers, and do not care about their honest customers. They provided me with an invalid address from the seller, so they should be responsible.

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I don't think it is the case that PayPal has a conscious decision to favor scammers but as a payment processing company that caters to what amounts to a "sub-prime" transactions market (people with no access to credit cards or ability to process credit cards, etc), it faces a lot of scammers in both the buying and selling side. To manually investigate and explore every possible scam in such a situation would be very expensive for the company and possibly affect its bottom line if not viability. It doesn't help that it benefits financially from pocketing the fees even with scams reducing the incentive to change things.

The only thing that would force a change in its procedures/policies is if incidents like this become well-publicized to the point people lose faith and trust in the system and stop using it to a level that affects their bottom line. But, like many other crimes, the victims of the scams like this often don't make it public either because it is too small an amount for them to bother or they are ashamed of falling for a "too good to be true" situation or both. As long as there is a sucker born every minute and there is PayPal, there will be scammers and there will be victims.

Either an FTC probe or a class action lawsuit will be inevitable if the number of such scams grows to a large enough number but there has been very little visibility into how big this problem until now to necessarily lead to that. But that may change in the future.