Hello, You have just fallen victim to a very common scam done daily at EBay via PayPal payments and PayPal policies help such scammers and puts the buyer at risk. Our ongoing investigations show that the recourse in these cases is possible mostly if you have paid through a credit card. In such cases, you can just call your credit card company for a chargeback AFTER you have filed the dispute with PayPal and send them that information with the fake address and they will issue a refund and PayPal will have to prove the validity of the charge. The bank processors will likely have seen these so many times with PayPal that they will not blink an eye in getting you the refund. The only side-effect is that PayPal may close or suspend your account but they make enough money from the commission from such scams from people who do not use a credit card or do not follow up that they may not bother with the few they have to refund. The scam works like this: 1. A seller, in most cases from China, lists an item (typically in the $200-$400 range) for around $20-$30 dollars using either a stolen account or a pipeline of eBay accounts created with a steadily planted sales and feedback from other fake/real accounts to build a star rating. Such cultivated accounts are used to harvest a scam once and discarded. Some common items used for such sales include smart phones, tablets, brand name clothing and accerssories for which the value can be easily ascertained by the buyer. 2. There will always be some buyers who fall for this "too good to be true" scams, primarily because of the prominent Buyer Protection displayed by PayPal on that item which seems like a risk worth taking. After all, in the worst case, they get a refund if they do not get that item as promised, right? 3. The seller sells about 300-600 of these in that one sale with a delivery date about 3-5 weeks away. As soon as the sale of that item is done, he/she waits for a week and files a tracking number with PayPal and waits for that money from that sale either directly because of the cultivated account in good standing or via transfer to a valid account and cashes in. Just like with USPS, you can generate a valid tracking number in China long before you ship anything. Most buyers wait for 3-4 weeks before disputing the claim. Meanwhile, the seller has closed out that account in Ebay and moved on to another account. 4. The PayPal policies are that you must file a dispute within 45 days. Some people miss this window and both the scammer and PayPal make money from such cases. 5. If you file a dispute with PayPal for no delivery, PayPal responds with the tracking number provided. The scammer then ships a token item with that tracking number, typically a coin or a bead or some such trinket. Now you hav to wait for that item to arrive and PayPal will do nothing until then. 6. When you receive that item and assuming it is not past 45 days, you can file a dispute or change your previous dispute to item not as advertised. In response, PayPal sends an automated mail to you that says "after careful review", they have decided that you will get a refund but only after the item is received back by the seller. The address will be an invalid one which never gets caught in that "careful review" which is nothing more than an automated e-mail. This can happen either by the seller not having filed a valid address or in most cases, the Chinese characters provided by the seller not translating into the e-mail or the web site dispute history. 7. The scammer is depending on two things in the above case. First, if the buyer finds out that it costs almost as much to mail the item back with a registered and tracked number to China as the amount to be refunded, they may decide to just forget about it or try to take it up with PayPal which goes nowhere since the only choice PayPal gives is to provide the tracking number or cancel the dispute. This is why the item is usually priced around $20 to start with. Second, even if you were to mail it back, it most likely bounce as undeliverable and so the tracking will never show the item as delivered and you will not get your refund from PayPal. In both such cases, the scammer and PayPal make money. 8. There will be a few cases in which the refund can be obtained, either by using the credit card chargeback or by being persistent with PayPal using their help number (not the online process which is useless for such cases) and escalating it to the supervisor, etc. The scammers are depending on such cases being very small pocketing most of the money collected as profit and PayPal getting enough fees from such uncontested sales that a few refunds may provide very little incentive to change the system to prevent such scams in the first place. So, my recommendation is to get to the dispute stage with PayPal where they give you the invalid address and send that information to your credit card company and dispute the charge (which can be easily done online at your bank) and almost always, you will get your refund back. If you are not purchasing these through a credit card or you have a PayPal seller account that generates money, you should open another account for purchases only and use it only with a credit card and not make purchases in the other account.
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