Hello All,
*NOTE THIS IS A LONG POST*
So I am in a little bit of a dilemma. I know that part of it is my own doing, but I think that a majority of it is also caused by a pretty “hackable” system. So, please bear with me while I go through my timeline. My goal is to see what my options are for legal recourse, or recourse with Paypal.
A few months ago, I sold a number of expensive camera lens on Craigslist. I have done this many times before, and I typically use the Paypal friends and family feature - #1 to save the extra 3% fee and #2 and more importantly, so that the “buyer” could not report to paypal later after they received their goods and try to chargeback the money and say the item was damaged / not received etc.
I always meet with the person in a public location to make the transaction. I usually let them inspect the lens, and then I go through and receive the money in paypal, make sure that I can transfer the funds to my bank, and then I handoff the lens. As it’s all done through “cash”, I dont have a formal receipt process, and it’s really buy it as is and thats it. I have done this dozens of times successfully in the past.
Fast forward to a few months ago when a person contacted me on paypal showing interest in one of my ads. I proceeded to meet with them in person and he agreed to pay for the lens via paypal. He mentioned he was in a partnership (wedding photog / paparazzi) with another person and that he would have them paypal me the funds via friends and family. The “other person” (red flag #1)paypaled me via friends and family (I didn’t see a 3% fee) and i was able to start the transfer of the funds to my bank. I proceeded to handover the lens to the person and made some small talk and left.
The next day, the same person called me and was asking if I had other lens for sale and that he would be interested in buying anything I had (red flag #2). I said yes, I had some other items, and he tried to negotiate the price. I was not interested in selling that badly, but then he said that his “clients” would be interested in paying retail (red flag #3) for them. I told him I could do that, but again, it would have to be paypal friends and family. I was getting suspicious at this point, but thought that paypal family was as good as cash, so I didn’t care what he did with the lens after it was out of my possession.
We agreed on a price for several more lenses I had, but this time, he said that instead of meeting up in person, that he would send an Uber to the same location we met at last time around. I asked how he would pay, and he said he would send me the funds ahead of time since I looked like a trustworthy guy (red flag #4). I agreed and 10 minutes prior to the Uber driver arriving, he had his “client” pay me the funds in paypal and I was able to initiate the fund transfer to my bank. After I saw that, I proceeded to hand off the lenses to the Uber driver.
This same procedure went on for a couple of additional days, and I believe I sold about 6 lenses total ($10k+) across 8 clients, as some of these “clients” split payments with multiple people. Note that all of this time I wasnt sure what was happening and that I had spidey senses blazing, but I thought I was protected with Paypal’s friends and family.
This all came to a crashing halt about 2 weeks later when I received my first “chargeback” from paypal. One of the lenses I sold was charged back by one of the “clients”. I immediately texted the buyer (note that the buyer had several different numbers he was texting me from (red flag #5)) and the buyer did not respond.
I knew I was being scammed at this point, so I thought I might be able to get the buyer to respond by enticing them with some more lenses. So I texted them again and played dumb and said that it’s weird how “client #1” would chargeback the lenses, and if he could contact them to resolve. And in the meantime, I had a bunch of additional lenses I wanted to sell to them.
That worked and lowered the “buyers” guard and they texted me back, and started to call me again. Note that 2 more chargebacks had come in at this time, but I did not make the “buyer” aware of that, and only 1 of them. We proceeded to chat over the next few days, and the seller agreed to pay back the funds from chargeback #1. He paypaled me, friends and family using another (different) “partners” account (I knew that he would charge this back later as well). The whole reason I continued to talk to him over phone and text was to build my case against him to show my innocence. I had recorded several conversations over phone and all of my text messages. That said, I never got his identity. He’s a professional scammer, so hes hidden behind multiple obfuscation layers.
My final communication with him was when I was ready to sell him another lens and when the Uber came, instead of giving the uber guy the lens, I had the driver give me the address of where he was going to (I recorded this whole transaction of me confronting theUber driver). I found out it was going to some pharmacy 30 miles away from me, likely some dropoff point. After that, the buyer was furious - I told them I couldnt deliver the lens because I noticed some other chargebacks and I needed to find out what was going on. Shortly after that, the “buyer” disappeared, and this time for good.
While all of the communication with the “buyer” was going on after the initial chargebacks (several days of communication), I was also communicating with PayPal to inform them that I had the scammer LIVE, and was capturing all of the texts, phone calls, etc. and I was telling PayPal that they needed to capture as much info as they could (IP addresses, login names, Geolocations, etc.). Note that I had two paypal transactions from the “buyer” after I caught on that they were a scammer. Transaction #1 was a payment for chargeback #1, and transaction #2 was a payment for the lens that was going to the Uber (the one where I was tracking the dropoff location).
I also informed PayPal after chargeback #1 that every chargeback after that was going to be related to the same “buyer” and that each of these “clients” were likely fake/hacked accounts. PayPal just said that they couldn't do anything about it because I was not protected due to “friends and family”. The way that each of the “clients” were able to chargeback was that they reported to their financial institution that each of these were “unauthorized transactions”. Therefore paypal said they couldn't do anything about this as they were just the broker. I asked how this was possible and that they should be supplying all of my evidence (timeline of ALL events, recorded calls, screenshots of text messages, police report,etc.) to the bank and that they should be trying to reach out to all of these “clients” and investigate them fully.
Again, Paypal just came back with the vanilla response that I have to submit my evidence to the dispute center and that it would be reviewed. I did that, along with 50+pages of evidence pointing to the fact that all of these chargebacks were inter-related and that this was clearly a scam against me.
As of today, I have had 7 chargebacks, with 3 remaining transactions that I am sure will get charged back in the upcoming months, and which I think will eventually go through in the buyers favor. Paypal has sided on the “buyer” for 3 of them, and 4 are still under investigation. Note that this whole time, Paypal has not provided a shred of evidence showing that the transactions were “legitimate”. I have shown that this was a scam, and submitted all of the evidence via the dispute center.
As an example of PayPal’s negligence, each time that the chargebacks came in, it would show the email of the “client” that performed the chargeback. I would email them at the address, and I would also PayPal message them. 90% of the emails came back with an NDR stating that the email address was disabled, and NONE of the users would response. This tells me that Paypal does not check on the validity of the registered emails, which can really make it easy for these fake accounts to be used.
Note that I was able to send the money to my bank originally, so all of these chargebacks are actually bringing my PayPal balance to negative amounts in the thousands. I have received my first “debt collection” notice from PayPal, but I am not intending on paying. My question now is what can I do to fight this, as it’s clearly a scam, and PayPal has not done nearly enough to assist with finding this scammer, and has been siding with them based on these garbage blanket policies (friends and family does not provide seller protection). I clearly sent the “buyer” my goods, and they took back the money.
TLDR: I was greedy, and got scammed by pros and now I am looking for legal assistance, or assistance with Paypal as they are sending debt collectors.
