Reversed Payment???

[angelkitten923]

I purchased an item on eBay, the money was taken from my bank account and the charges appear on my paypal account. However, there was an error in the transaction and my payment was reversed. I never received notification about this from paypal, I just happened to log on and the said item never showed up in my purchase history on eBay.

I contacted paypal via phone, and they told me the money will be returned to its original source (my bank account) in 30 days. I thought these transactions were immediate? it was a large sum of money, so I'm worried that it will actually take this long to get my money back, or I might not get it at all. I also am clueless as to why this happened, I contacted the seller, and they told me they had received the payment and then it was suddenly reversed, and they had no idea why.

Any help would be appreciated!

[PayPal_Andy]

angelkitten923- Lemme try and help you figure out what's going on here!  As far as the payment being reversed, there's one thing I can think of that might have happened (it's a guess, so don't hold it against me if I'm wrong).  If the item was a Buy it Now, and you and someone else both 'bought' it within a short amount of time (I've heard 5 minutes), then the system is designed to reverse both payments, as it apparently can't determine who bought it first. So that's my best guess why it reversed with no explanation.

As far as getting your money back, there's a couple scenarios here.  If it was made with a debit card, refunds back to your bank can take up to 30 days, but usually they're done much faster.  Something else that might happen is that we actually can't refund directly back to the card (some debit cards don't allow that), in which case the money would be returned to your PayPal balance and you could withdraw it back to your bank.  That would actually only take about 3-5 business days.

So ultimately you'll get your money back, and it shouldn't take 30 days.  That timeframe is actually based on your credit card company timeframes for posting credits back to their accounts.

Hope that rather long winded answer helps!

Andy