Wow. These are some discouraging postings. I got caught in two very similar situations. Last spring I ordered a lot of clothing online that was really beautiful and that I looked forward to getting. It was not cheap but not crazy expensive either. When I got it the designs - Van Gough paintings in beautiful colors - were fairly close to what had been advertised but the fabrics were all wrong, the styles were not as advertised and across the board they were a disappointment. I decided to keep one shirt and one pair of jeans (the other pants I ordered were a joke) and dutifully emailed the company on its website notifying them that I wanted to return the clothes but needed their address so I could do that. Well, you all know what happens next - the eternal runaround of bs messages delaying and never giving me the address and offering me far less than what I paid to just keep everything and not go any further. I said not on your life and finally got disgusted and contacted PayPal, especially because the window for returns had closed of course but they had made it impossible for me to meet it with no address. I asked PP to get the address for me and initiated a complaint. I'll skip all that went on but in the end PP did get me a full refund but I did have to send the stuff back which I did because the situation wasn't quite as egregious as the Xingyao situation, and I did get the $30 back, plus for whatever reason the amount that PP got as a refund was more than what I had paid for what I returned so I came out fairly well not losing too much money and it was my choice to return some of the stuff I could have kept.
But then I managed to fall for another scam (DUH) from a company advertising Birkenstock shoes on sale. They were pretty cheap but not so cheap that it was beyond belief that it could be legit so I went ahead and ordered several pairs to the tune of over $100. Talk about a bait and switch. When they came they were total stinky ugly knock-offs total garbage that didn't remotely bear any resemblance to anything like a Birkenstock . How do they think they can even get away with this? No return address, no way to contact them. Give me a break. I emailed them immediately and got the same old bs of course offering me a partial refund etc etc. I said the same thing as all of you - no way I'm paying return postage since this was a deliberate attempt to rip me off not a mistake and certainly not MY mistake. I also told them I was going to report them to the USPS for mail fraud because they sent this crap through the USPS disguising the fact that it came from China with a return address in California that turned out to be a mail contractor, and I was also going to report them to every other agency in the US that dealt with this kind of fraud. And I filed my complaint with PP. I went straight to talking to an agent, and told him I did not want to have to pay the return postage for the reasons that everyone says. He told me about the $30 thing and I said, yeah, sorry, not enough - sending this stuff to China costs a whole lot more than that and in the end it will cost more than I paid for the shoes in the first place.
Then he told me I should put on the return label "Returned cargo" and that would exempt me from paying the taxes which would bring down the cost of shipping and by the end of the conversation he committed PP to paying whatever the difference was between the $30 I would get from the returns program and the full cost so that I wouldn't have to pay anything for the return shipping. I said that worked for me. After that I got an email that they had reviewed the case and were refunding me the full amount of my purchase which would be effective when they received the tracking number from my shipping label. I used the same company I used last time called Easy Ship and by putting in Returned Cargo in the tax id box the total cost was ridiculously low even with the insurance - it came out to $34.10. And I'm going to get all of that back.
My point in telling you all this story is to emphasize how important it is to not let PP off the hook and be bloody persistent with them because when I've talked to actual agents they have been decent. Or maybe I've just been lucky. I agree with every single person who asks why PP continues to do business with these obvious scammers and it seems to me the only way to get them to stop is to stay on their tails and keep forcing them to refund everyone's money until it just gets too expensive to keep doing business with them. Because I'd be surprised if they're getting a dime back from the Chinese, frankly. And by the way, I called the FBI about reporting this, and they referred me to the Federal Trade Commission where I filed a complaint where you won't individually get your money back but where they can go after the scammers, and I'm also going to followup with the US Postmaster which he told me to do and also the Federal Consumer Protection Agency which also handles this. I want to go after their **bleep** every way I can. I saw other reviews on line where the exact same thing as happened to me with these shoes happened to others who just felt like they had to suck it up. Especially since the last time I checked "Fashion fcu" the entity from which I ordered the shoes had disappeared completely from the web - website completely gone, Facebook gone, all mention or link to them completely scrubbed out of existence. I hope I've learned my lesson about ever ordering off the web again although a few years ago I ordered some shoes and boots and they came exactly as ordered and were beautiful which probably led me to let down my guard. But never again.
It is really disappointing to hear everyone's bad experiences with PayPal because I use them precisely because I trust(ed?) them to have my back on purchases and they haven't let me down so far. Of courses I do have to overlook the fact that the interest rate on their credit is obscene and the guy who owns them is a Trump die-hard, but other than that .... I didn't read all the way to the end of the posts so I hope that at least some of you finally got some satisfaction and help and I'm so sorry you ended up getting so ripped off and suffering all this first from the scammers and then from PP.
