Ok so I have a serious complaint here. A number of designers and programmers I have worked with want to use Paypal for fraud protection. Let me share with you two stories: One is about me. Before I knew anything about anything years ago I bought a turnkey petstore. It was hosted by a gentlemen whose name I will keep private. This gentlemen sold his company and continued to charge his former clients for hosting services he no longer provided. This was not cuaght for months when the new owners send out an aoplogy. I contacted Paypal and they said that they agreed it was fraud but could not help me. Today a nice secretary in my office had a similar experience. She paid to have cookie cutter site designed in Feb. She paid a sum of 900 bucks for site, estore, and hosting. Now in June she still has no site and no one can reach the designer/host. She contacted Paypal and their reply was that they could not help her in this sort of case. So if Paypal's big thing is that is provides fraud protection, where is it?
This is seen all the time, if the product isnt tangible, they do sod all IIRC.. Which is a bad way for them to do business if you ask me
A chargeback can provide more protection. Here is PayPal's description of this process: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/seller/ChargebackRisk-outside
I've had several arguements with Paypal about this topic. They claim protection etc., but in reality it means very little. They don't cover virtual products or services, supposedly because they can't be verified like a shipment can. How about for virtual sales the transaction is treated like an escrow. Payment is held by paypal until a link is clicked by the buyer saying they received whatever services etc., then release the funds. By doing that, no refund would be allowed and payment is received only after satisfaction. Right now it's way too easy to charge back for the hell of it.
We had an order a couple of weeks ago for a reasonable sum of money, but luckily I noticed the email on the paypal payment and our site didn't match....emailed the paypal email and the poor man suddenly realised he had over £1000 of fraudulent payments from his account. What makes this so bad for him is that the fraudster was clever and all the payments appeared to come from this mand IP address so paypal won't do anything about it even though these transactions were wildey out of character etc!! We have been on the opposite end too- sold an item on ebay, posted it off then recieved a charge back from Paypal as the customer disputed delivery saying it haden't turned up. Bizarrely enough my husband emailed him a couple of weeks later to see if it had turned up and he emailed us to say it had but would not repay the money!!! Well, we emailed Paypal thinking it was an open and shut case only to be told they weren't interested Grrrrrrrrr- keep to take the money back off us when we could PROVE we posted it though.....
And we wonder why we get loaded with scammers, they pay for the service/etc, a week later they open a chargeback and they win.. Go figure!