It should be completely clear by now that PayPal's interest is in protecting these scam sellers, not their customers who are victims of the scam. They will play dumb and act as if this is just an ordinary, good-faith seller and the issue is a simple mistake or miscommunication and they are just looking for an amicable solution fair to both sides, while their community message boards explode with reports of the scams and, no doubt, they receive hundreds of similar disputes for each of these companies (hopefully, the discovery process of a class action suit will eventually expose this). To this day, the scam companies are putting out web ads with PayPal as the only payment option. For all intents and purposes, PayPal is an accomplice to this scam and is acting as the bag man.
If you're reliant on PayPal for the dispute, it's least frustrating to accept you won't be getting your money back, and hopefully it was only $30-40 and you can treat it as payment for a lesson learned. Know that PayPal is on the side of the scammers, and never make payments using PayPal, and if you see an online vendor who only takes PayPal, treat this as if he only takes direct bank transfer or iTunes gift cards. If for some reason you must use PayPal to make a payment, make sure the default mode of payment is a credit card. And please do as I'm going to and report this to the media and consumer protection law enforcement. Hopefully there will eventually be a class action lawsuit or major criminal fraud investigation that will put a stop to this. I have also taken to adding 'Scam Warning' comments to Facebook ads from known Chinese scammers.
