OK - So I got onto the friendly support staff (after an hour on hold...) The problem is that the payment was in GBP, and because of some EU or similar rules of some kind, they're not allowed to simply reverse the card payment, so they had to send money back. The problem was that my account did not have any GBP balance, only USD - and it seems their system is programmed to extract refunds from our bank accounts in that situation, rather than using the PayPal balance (how or why is irrelevant - that's what they do, and we're stuck with it). The good news is that apparently, on the very last web page before they do this, there is a warning that they're about to fund the refund from your bank. If you see that: stop and work some other resolution out with your customer, or risk paying a fee equivalent to about 10% of the payment value (there's fees and about 4 levels of currency transfer commissions eating into you here - for me, the money went GBP -> USD -> AUD -> USD -> GBP and on top of the 72 GBP fee) So - bottom line - it was my fault for not paying close enough attention to that fine print.
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