This has happened to me twice, and I have been on opposite sides of it.
First, as a buyer. My new laptop needed an inexpensive Photoshop, and an eBay listing named "Linux Photoshop" looked right. I paid, and it shipped shortly afterward.
The package turned out to hold a burned disc with GIMP, a freeware application that I know well and did not want. When I complained, the seller said tough luck. I filed a chargeback with PayPal, marking the item as fraudulent. PayPal's position was that I would get money back only by posting the burnt CD to him, and that my refund would not cover the postage either way.
As a result, a man who sold a free program disguised as a different product pocketed the $9 he billed for postage, though it cost him around $2 including packing materials. He also left me negative feedback that called me the "Lame Ebayer Ever" and said I deserved a Sweet Chin Music to the face for acting dumb. Hardly bright of him, yet he had moved over 700 copies on eBay before being stopped, and I was roughly customer 200.
The other incident was recent, a week or two back, and I was the seller.
About 100 auctions of mine were live, offering extra DVDs, and I staggered them to ease my workload. A single bidder took seven of them. I bundled the postage and sent everything the next day. Within a week, he wrote to say the items arrived in excellent shape, gave me positive feedback, and placed bids on others.
Roughly two weeks later he won three more in a later series. I invoiced combined shipping, payment came that evening, and the parcel left the next morning. In both cases the destination was a confirmed address. Afterward I discovered the two addresses differed, one in California and the other in Florida, with different recipient names.
At about 10PM on the day I mailed his second order, two eBay messages from him came in within minutes of each other. By the time I tried to open them they had been removed by eBay, although they were just two weeks old and I had planned to keep them until the matter closed. They sounded panicked: he claimed to have supplied a wrong address and wanted the goods sent to the first. I replied that they had gone out some twelve hours before. No answer ever came.
Strangely, the second parcel landed with a friend of a friend in Florida, who knew my name at once and rang me. Recently they had purchased a PSP from the very man who had bought my DVDs. PayPal apparently suffered a major error that briefly showed their address as confirmed on his account. When I grasped this, I emailed him that they would send the parcel along in the morning, and requested his confirmation of the address so it would be correct this time.
At 3AM that same night, he started a chargeback with PayPal covering both shipments.
Phoning PayPal has been miserable. Eight people gave me eight different answers, even after escalation. The advice ranged from having my friend send it to him, to not sending it, to blaming a PayPal address glitch, to the claim that the buyer had stolen my friend's bank details, to telling me to keep the money and wait for a callback that never arrived, to returning everything to him. What a mess.
It ended with an instruction that my friend forward the second package and provide a tracking number, and then the money from that shipment would stay with me.
The first shipment is gone. No tracking was used, so under eBay and PayPal rules I cannot demonstrate delivery. That he wrote to confirm the goods came in good condition and left positive feedback means nothing to them. Even more telling, he has pulled this before. His feedback was a perfect 100%, so I did not notice at first, but a previous seller edited their feedback to state that he filed a chargeback, claiming non-arrival, and kept the goods. eBay and PayPal ignore all of it. He gets refunded whatever else is true.
Without the lucky discovery of the second package, he would have received every cent back thanks to these ridiculous rules.
The worst insult: PayPal will still charge me its fee for receiving the payment, and then take the whole amount back out when refunding him.
Words cannot describe my anger. I feel truly spat upon by a site that I helped build up and improve.
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