Greetings!
Longtime PayPal user... just experienced a new (?) type of seller scam... very simple, and hard for a buyer to detect, and harder to defend. This is what just happened to me, and unraveling it with PayPal has been a nightmare:
1. Made a purchase from a seller via a vinyl record buying/selling marketplace (a little over $300).
2. Less than 12 hours later, the seller contacts PayPal claiming that they had been contacted by the buyer with an "item not received" case.
3. PayPal records this case as opened by me, the buyer.
4. Seller contacts PayPal 8 minutes later and says, "we got everything worked out."
5. PayPal records this case as closed, with the note to the buyer, "Once a case has been closed, it can't be reopened or escalated to a claim." This means that the seller can keep my money.
6. I saw the "case opened/closed" emails four hours later, and contacted PayPal. They were no help. It took contacting PayPal several times over the next few days, including forcing them to look at device/login information to even begin to convince them that I had not opened or closed the case.
7. Via other circumstances unknown to me (but not hard to discern), the marketplace platform notified me that the seller had been suspended, and directed me to pursue a refund with PayPal.
8. That information was shared with PayPal, and after several days, and waiting 35 minutes to talk to a human (all previous support was via chat with PayPal's India support team). That person finally tells me that the original case was opened/closed by the seller, and they were now processing my refund. PayPal phone support says there is no way to protect from this type of scam, and they recommend to "keep a close eye on your PayPal account."
Now you know...
