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"Keeping your financial information secure is absolutely essential when buying online. Whether it's ecommerce, sending money or buying with debit and credit cards online, trust PayPal to help keep your transactions secure"
What’s covered with PayPal Purchase Protection
- You purchased 3 items, but only received 2
Quoted from PayPal web site.
When buyer make orders from a web site, buyers pay the fee first, and they believe they can rely on the third-party PayPal to protect them.
However, in real world, this may be not be true.
One of important thing is that how to prove the seller have sent the merchandise to a buyer?
In current practice, PayPal only accepts a track number that shows that the tracked shipment is delivered. Whether the shipment is sent to the buyer is NOT requested nor verified. The type of the shipment is also ignored, a fake track info of first-class package (max 13oz) can be a proof of delivered of a 20 pounds merchandise.
This opens a big hole to scam websites. Once they receive a payment from a buyer, they send a first-class USPS package (may be empty) to someone else in the buyer's town and gives PayPal as the proof of the merchandise is "delivered". Because of the fake delivery, the buyer complaint of "not received" is denied. To reopen the case, the buyer needs to provide a proof from the USPS that the tracking number is not sent to the buyer.
As perspective of USPS, release info of a tracking info is prohibited. To provide a proof that a random track number is not related to someone is not their responsibility, at least not a priority job. It takes time and effort for a buyer to get this proof.
Recently some fraud web sites utilize this hole to scam. For example, “larry cloth scam” and “Scammed by Larry cloth” threads have many victims (I am one of them). Several people cannot get the money back even after they provided a proof that the shipment was not sent to them.
The thread “PayPal is Complicit With a Chinese Online Scam” and “Fraud web site fitslive.com” also list the same on-line scams.
PayPal may not intend, but current PayPal’s dispute policy are helping scam of these web site. As a buyer I really wish PayPay can fit this hole and require solid proof from sellers to protect buyers’ benefit.
