Sold digital items via paypal and bought more digital items for buyer since he said he couldnt get them from his country. I bought them with what I thought was his money but paypal reversed the transaction. Anyway, apparently skype chat logs are not enough and the paypal seller protection policy is dreadful. I am aware I agreed to paypal policies but the fact that they ruled in the buyers favour is ridiculous and now I have a negative balance of nearly $580 dollars. I live in Australia so I contacted my bank and blocked paypal from taking money out of my account. I will update further if debt collection agencies chase me up. Is anyone aware thought of what could happen in Australia? I am 19 and I don't have a credit history as far as I know. I am not even sure how they can even link this dispute to any record of me even if they have my name and address and phone number. This is not America and I don't have a social security number so I am gonna see what happens.
Are you able to get a refund on the digital items that you purchased? I am in sydney, last dispute I had, paypal had the funds out of my bank account before I even had the email to say a dispute had been raised. Was this an actual dispute? or simply a chargeback (stolen credit card) kinda thing? did you sell via ebay, or just directly? seeing as you were scammed, be sure to check out this: http://www.police.nsw.gov.au/community_issues/fraud_prevention/scams
Paypal called it an unauthorised transaction. So the paypal account that I have listed as the buyer for the transaction has informed paypal that they never issued the transaction and the funds are being returned. I guess you could call it a charge back and a stolen paypal account. In any case I have to to prove that I sent the items to this person. Since the item is digital i.e. intangible I cant prove this. All I can do is show the skype chat logs which match up closely with the times of the transaction as well as the amount stated. The skype email address is not the same as the paypal email so I am even more stuffed. As I said I am aware that a lot of the blame is mine since I accepted the paypal policies but I still cant believe they ruled in the buyers favour so quick. I basically called paypal and asked them what they could do and within 30 mins of them explaining to me how fucked I was and how because of their policies they cant help they closed the case and issued the negative balance on my account. I didn't even get a chance to submit skype chat logs or emails etc. Contacting my bank in regards to refund of purchase of digital items is a good idea though so I will give that a shot. As for your link I am not sure what I am supposed to do with that? Do you recommend I report the scam to the police via their form? I live in Queensland so there might be something similar.
I think there is one for queensland somewhere. Yea, I think it is worthwhile to try to report it, I know they wont do much about it, (and I wouldnt expect anything) but never hurts to report it, I mean, they would not have set these things up, if it was a total waste of time, so no harm in trying it as you have nothing to lose. I would still try to see if you can get a refund on the goods from where you purchased them from. What exactly was the item that you sold? is it something that you can 'cancel' (like a license), or something that you can try to resell to get back your investment?
It was an old computer game I used to play. Basically I was just selling in the details to log into the account. The buyer who said he was from france asked me if I could buy some more items for him on the account I was selling before I sold it to him. He stated that he couldn't get the items from his location which is likely true. In any case he said he would send the money to me first and I could then use sent money to buy the items he requested. He would even leave me a tip. Now the money has been returned to the buyer and the $400's worth of items is also in the buyers hands. To be honest I was actually worried when I purchased these digital items and even considered that something like this might happen. However as soon as he offered to send me the money first to buy the digital in game items, I didn't see how there could be an issue. In any case I should have refused and the biggest thing I've learned is to never sell digital or intangible goods or even services via paypal. If I actually had the money / was currently working I would just chalk it up to very hard lesson learned and probably pay the money. However, I dont have the money and I think it's worth fighting because paypal didnt even seem to try to review my case at all.