Taking direct legal action against buyer for chargeback fraud.

[RBeam6]

So to get this out of the way before everyone points it out to me …. I’m an idiot. I committed the cardinal sin of selling something large and expensive to someone who picked up the item(s) locally and letting them pay using Paypal rather than cash. Two weeks later …. a claim and chargeback against me (still have the money, but a big negative balance on my account) saying I didn’t deliver the items and wasn't responding to them.

In my defense, while I used to do a fair amount of selling (mainly audio gear through Ebay, Audiogon and the like) I don’t anymore. Was just clearing out a couple of big heavy items I no longer used and had been sitting around for a while. Also, the story is too long to go into here, but it began with a buy it now in Nov of last year and after corresponding back and forth with the guy for months the pickup didn’t occur until March of this year and by the time he came to do the pickup I was swamped with work and so glad to finally be done with it I just didn’t think.

And, I’m not here to bash PayPal. While this is the first time I’ve ever had someone scam me this way I’ve read the horror stories, know PayPal always sides with the buyer in these cases and pretty much knew I was SOL when I got the dispute and saw the reason given for the dispute was an outright lie. I covered my bases by reaching out to the buyer through all of the available emails and phone numbers I had. But, since the intent was actual fraud, it was no big surprise when I got no response.

And, I have to say, while they weren’t able to offer me any remedy through PayPal the two customer service reps I talked to were friendly, apologetic and did give me some fairly useful information that I can use for what I plan to do next.

As a quick aside …. I do think it’s strange that a company with PayPal’s resources hasn’t come up with some sort of app that would give the seller a way to have the buyer confirm taking possession of something locally so sellers would feel comfortable using PayPal in those situations. Seems like they’re losing a lot of potential revenue … but I guess they have their reasons.

Back to the issue at hand …. The one thing I do have going for me is that, even though this guy is a crook, he’s a crook that really overshares. I have reams of correspondence with this guy through Ebay, email and text which show his intent to pick the items up and communications for coordinating it up to and including the day he actually arrived. I also have a neighbor with whom he directly interacted. So, nothing that helps with getting recourse through PayPal but I think it easily reaches the level of proof for a small claims case and possibly even criminal fraud. The amount involved is close to $5000 so it’s not a trivial sum.

Which gets me, finally, to my point. Even though I’m in this mess because of something stupid that I did … I’m not, in fact, an entirely stupid person.
When I began going through all of the exchanges I had with this guy I thought this was possibly just a single act of opportunistic fraud. Maybe the buyer started out with good intent but got home, realized he had overspent and took advantage of the buyer-biased PayPal protections. But once I began putting together the pieces with the information at hand it became apparent that this was not the case.

Realized he’d been using fake identities based on sports figures and musicians that he liked … so I didn’t actually know this guy’s real name. But, as I said above, this dude enthusiastically overshares and while he uses fake identities for any activity that involves buying or selling items I began to find little nuggets of gold that lead me to his social media profiles where I found his real identity, physical address and, maybe more importantly, pictures of him.

This is not someone that would just blend into your average crowd. He’s a very large human being with a lot of very …. interesting …. tattoos of which he is obviously very, very proud.

Also was able to track down an Audiogon user that he had attempted to scam. I was able to reach out to this person and he provided some of the information that let me start putting all the little pieces into one clear picture.

Once I hit the motherload I so, so badly wanted to send him a message saying “I’ve got you #(@#*@!~ … I know who you are, know where you live and I’m coming for you”. But I’ve restrained myself and currently have feelers out through a few friends to find an attorney that’s willing to deal with something like this where I’d only be looking for a few billable hours. Just enough to find out what actions to take, in which order to take them and possibly send notice to this person on something with a legitimate legal letterhead.

So, if anyone has actually read through this novel I just wrote and has been through anything similar ….. any advice? I can provide more information but thought this was enough to get the ball rolling.