Ordered what was supposed to be a lamp resembling a nuclear explosion back in April. (25 usd) Fell victim to what is now undoubtedly the classic bait and switch scheme where they send you a worthless unrelated item instead. Complained to the seller directly. (i was still ignorant to this scheme at this point) Seller wants item back and will refund. Will not pay for shipping. Tracked shipping to China is 75 euro's or so for me so that is not happening. (seller's chinese location by the way wasn't clear untill after purchase, the webstore is a front implying you buy more locally) Seller "understood my predicament" offered partial refund instead. (50%) Told him I want a full refund as this is not my "mistake". Got offered slightly bigger partial refund. (60%) So that wasn't going anywhere. Opened claim with PayPal. Opened the claim as item not received. Because essentially that's what this is. Went through the whole shebang only to have paypal change the claim type. Paypal changed the claim to "item not as described" which I think is greatly underselling what's actually going on here but whatever. I guess that is technically true. Seller again offers partial (50%) refund. Which again I declined. Now again I'm at full refund if I ship the item back. My first gripe here is that the resolution center has no other way of handeling this other then inputting shipping data. So it assumes that shipping the item back is the only possible outcome at this step in the claim, which is ofcourse not true. My second gripe here is that i've now received two different adresses from this seller. Neither of which are complete or actually resolve to any actual location. At least not on Google maps. And what parts of the adress google does find is miles apart from eachother. Paypal doesn't seem to check this or care so I'm supposed to ship to a non existing address. My third gripe is I guess classic neglegence. Contacted Paypal. Got an answer that I am in fact supposed to ship the item back. But Paypal has a return shipping service that will cover a whopping 30% of the shipping costs in this case! (that's not how they sold it but I read the terms) Obviously I replied I'm not shipping anything back, again explaining why I think i'm beeing duped, and that this isn't my problem to solve to begin with. And why paypal needs to just refund me and ideally reject this seller from their platform. Because this seller is definately doing this full scale. They've got their own topic. I sent that message about a week ago and haven't had a reply since. Tried contacting them through twitter. Got an initial response but after supplying the case ID they are ghosting me as well. Tried calling but the de support desk is closed due to covid (Really guys? Still? I haven't lost a single day of work and I work in the same customer service sector) which is only something I got notified of after going through their horribly constructed phone menu for about 10 minutes. At this point i'm more annoyed at PayPal then the scammer. Are there any other avenues to be used to move people into doing something at this company? The dispute itself is due to expire somewhere today I want to make more noise because trying to get this solved in some sort of civil manner is appearantly not happening.
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