Hi Ashley,
I'm curious if you know what efforts Paypal is taking to prevent these scams from recurring. I just recently fell victim to another similar issue with products that are shipped from China and are low-value dollar store plastic goods when they advertised a sophisticated robotic product. Searching the forums there are pages and pages of these same complaints and the sellers seem to be able to operate with impunity by using a hole in the Dispute Resolution process.
By shipping some goods they are able to force their return at expense greater than the cost of the product originally. This means most will either give up the dispute or accept the low dollar refund from the seller to get something back (and which lets the seller avoid dispute numbers). Even when refunding a buyer they will be pocketing a large amount of cash as they shipped something of almost no value.
The pattern of a company listed with a CA address that ships products from China and sends goods other than advertised repeats over and over. They don't even bother changing the name much. NC TECHNOLOGY, ZG TECHNOLOGY, AMGT TECHNOLOGY... over and over I'm finding more and more listings with social media ad campaigns selling a quality product and then shipping some slightly related garbage. Paypal seems to be siding with the seller in most instances hiding behind the dispute resolution policy allowing the scammers to operated even longer till a critical mass of disputes of fraud is filed.
It's one thing if I need to return something since I'm not impressed with the quality. It's entirely another when I purchase a robotic self-solving Rubik's cube from an add campaign and website all carefully crafted with fake video of the product and then ship me dollar store plastic crap. That isn't just a dispute, it's fraud, they are purposefully listing a product they don't sell and shipping something else. I know because the product they claimed to sell doesn't exist.
If Paypal allows those committing fraud to receive payment through their infrastructure and hides behind the dispute process all while collecting transaction fees, I have to say that seems complicit. The patterns of these sellers is clear and identifiable with a minimal exertion of data vetting. Companies in CA shipping with international China based tracking numbers? Large upticks in sales from pushed social add campaigns, oddly large upticks in seller problem reports. Or how about just using the same basic company name over and over with different letters in front of it?
I'm waiting on the resolution of my dispute. If they follow the pattern of insisting I send this back to the seller for a refund or deny the claim I intend to delete my Paypal account and encourage others to do so. The only real way to get change it so make this cost more than it brings in. Since the scammers are bringing in a pretty penny that will mean lots of users voting with their dollars and moving from the platform to safe payment methods. A credit card would never allow these types of behaviors by those on their payment network.
