posted on September 9, 2000 10:33:25 AM
This article however propogated the nonsense that, when scammed, one should call PayPal rather than one's credit card company.
Note that PayPal will not allow one to add money to one's account from a credit card, except to pay for something. If it really were "cash", then you could, for example, withdraw it. Banks will in fact reverse charges when something paid for by credit card, through PayPal, is never received (or if one receives a brick instead of what one paid for).
PayPal is motivated to have its buyers confused as to their rights. They will always talk about the PayPal protection protection, which is vastly inferior to the ordinary credit card protection, as if that's the plan.
To their credit, PayPal dropped their attempt to punish scammed buyers who did invoke their protections under federal credit card law, but they didn't do that until it became widely publicized as a result of the disk drive scam.
posted on September 9, 2000 10:54:57 AM
I scanned the feeback of the sellers in question and noticed some interesting things.
The vast majority of the people who were scammed were new and had a feedback rating of 0-5. I looked at the positive feedbacks and noticed that all most all of the people had feedback ratings of (1) and the 1 positive feedback was left by the scammer. This should be a red flag to anyone who has been buying on auction sites for any length of time.
These scams were very obvious and should seldom catch anyone by surprise except for the unsuspecting newbie.
