Hiya all,
I’m an ebay user, buyer and seller, 100% 300+ feedback.
I bought an item, a high end “brand new” router about ten days ago from a seemngly well established vendor. It arrived in really suspicious condition (someone came to my door and literally handed me the retail boxed item, no shipping packaging, and looking like it had been previously opened, like home made cellophane wrap).
I spent a day trying to get the router to work before concluding that it’s actually faulty and not working. So I came to the Ebay site to file for return and found that they had deleted the listing from which I purchased, and removed the seller for violations. The site informed me that I couldn’t file a complaint because I had not paid for the goods and the sale was cancelled.
PayPal records clearly show this is not the case.
I reached out on Twitter and Ebay support team advised me that the seller had been removed for violations and that the reason their system reported the non-payment of goods was because the payment was ‘pending’ at PayPal, and had not been passed to the seller because of the suspension action that had been taken.
I was advised to get in touch with PayPal to request they release the payment back to my account...
PayPal then informed me that EBay were wrong and that the payment had indeed cleared my account and had been passed to the merchant account and was pending there, and that I needed to come back to Ebay to complain since there was nothing Paypal could do to recover the money.
Detecting I was in the process of being defrauded, I got back in touch with Ebay Twitter support and repeated what I had been told, and Ebay Support told me again that Paypal were totally wrong and needed to escalate this, that Ebay could see the funds pending and a simple reversal needed authorising n the light of the suspension of the merchant. They said that since eBay are not a financial institution it would always be passed to Paypal to do the reversal.
So I went back to Paypal and asked for this. Support agents didn’t seem to know what thy were doing. One said he was escalating my complaint but then describd the problem as my being unable to access my funds... another told me to file through their Resolution Centre which only offered me ‘goods not as described.’
i sent them the whole story through...
I’ve just received a message from them to say that they’ve contacted the seller (I thought the seller was being suspended for fraudulent activities!!!) and if I send the item by courier to Vietnam, they’ll refund me once the seller confirms receipt of goods in the condition listed in their ebay listing (i.e. “New”). The rest of the process is automated and I have two weeks to comply and upload my tracking number or I lose my appeal...
Except I bought goods in the UK listed as shipping from UK which arrived in literally 24 hours having shipped from UK...
And I think the seller is a fraudster...
And I can’t verify the address in Vietnam as being real... it seems to go nowhere.
And I’ll spend half the value of the goods shipping it back...
And if the “vendor” isn’t at the address and doesn’t confirm receipt of he goods I get nothing back...
So the two accounts of this transaction and the suggested actions to remedy the suspension of the vendor and his supply of dodgy goods is so wildly different between EBay and PayPal...
I need help.
What are my rights?
Ebay guarantees protection to buyers...
I’m being defrauded here...
