Dear friends of the paypal community,
The reason I am reaching out to you today, is because I am fed up being treated like garbage by paypal. They do not even have the decency to reply to my numerous emails, and reading some of the other stories out there: if they did there would probably not be anything of value in their reply anyway!
It is time paypal takes this issue seriously, because it used to be that not accepting paypal in your store would hurt sales, now it hurts you even more accepting it.
A bit of my back story: I run an online (free to play) game where players can purchase credits, and after certain total spend values are hit they unlock visual ranks in the game. The bad part is, scammers use these ranks to win trust from other players. (If you are looking to trade with someone, and it appears they have spend over a $100 on the game, you would assume they would not risk their account for something as silly as your items)
The problem is, they use this privilege to scam one or more individuals, until they finally receive a penalty (whether it be a (temporary) account suspension, mute, or smaller restrictions to certain areas of the game), at this point they will file a claim to paypal they never received their items and get everything back. They can do this for up to 180 days after the purchase!
The 180 days is not an acceptable time frame, since virtual goods are delivered instantly in this case (and I am sure everywhere within a 24 hour time frame).
It used to be the policy that you can't dispute a payment for virtual goods, because there is no way to proof it thus paypal stays out of it. Now they will never give the seller their rightfully earned money, and the scammers goes on to do this in other places as well. Whatever you file as evidence in the dispute, they will always return the money.
This is absolutely unacceptable, paypal is sponsoring the new era of scammers. We (other online sellers) need to unite and force paypal to provide us with a FAIR means to show we did fulfill our end of the deal.
I have send them emails detailing the issue, and, for the love of god, what I can possibly do to get what is rightfully mine? But in paypals eyes you don't even deserve a response.
I understand the difficulties involved in virtual items and tracking the delivery of this, but why is a new buyer believed above a respected merchant account? When denying our claims, you should ATLEAST provide us with a solid reasoning they received their money back, and what we COULD do to prove we are in our right. Failing to tell us how we could possibly avoid these scams just shows to me: there is no way. If that's the case, I am forced to go to any competitor, because I simply CAN'T keep all the money on my paypal account for 180 days just incase everyone files a chargeback and ruins the business.
I am sure I am not the only one out there, it is time paypal comes up with a clear and fair measurement for this and not blindly hand back money to all the buyers. You might as well change the "dispute" button to a "refund" button if that's the case, and remove the whole dispute process because it's nothing but a waste of time if it's not even read.
