I had a pretty rare situation today. A "eBay listings removed - unauthorized user of buyer or bidder account" notice on a $10 video game. This used to happen to me a LOT back in the day when I sold mostly CDs as that attracted a lot more scammy people. It's pretty rare now days as it doesn't happen much on vintage collectors toys.
Basically I think some people use the black web to get credit cards numbers, they order small stuff like this (mostly video game related as we are dealing with young people here) and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
I know this because I had a CC number stolen and the minute it leaked I got a few dozen small purchases hit my card within the same minute. It was all for random teen stuff that they like ranging from pizza to video game crap to online gaming accounts. The first one made it though (some offbrand paypal like website) but the rest got blocked. They were always for small amounts under $20 as the companies and law doesn't have the manpower to go after these small time crooks. It's the bigger charges they go after.
That was some good fraud preventing by my CC company, but they treated me like I was some type of criminal when I tried to sorted this all out. Over the phone they had me go one by one over each transaction to say that I didn't make it, and there were dozens. It would have been so much easier to tell them that I didn't do any that day, but nope they wouldn't allow that, so it took over an hour for that bullshit. Like come on really?
They even sent me legal documents to sign which made me feel like they were blaming me and they were all so high and mighty and haughty about this. Like WTF, really? They made out that I was careless or something. What had happened was that I bought cheap eyeglasses from a website three months prior and they got hacked. A year or so later I got a letter which basically admitted to that happening and they offered a free year of protection. Whatever...
Anyway, this item was sent out two weeks ago and of course there is no way to get the item back. I know it's all form letters, but why do they tell me to not do the transaction if the tracking already shows the had arrived two weeks ago? Get with it ebay!
In the old days this would have cost me a lot! I would have been hit with a $25 to $35 chargeback fee on top of loosing the item and shipping cost.
I used to get them once or twice a year like clockwork. 5 times a year in the very old days. Then around 10 years ago policies changed and they stopped charging me for something which I had no control over. I think someone still pays for it, probably ebay/paypal, but more likely we sellers do when they had raised (restructured) our fees to cover stuff like this. It rarely happens these days as paypal basically green lights almost every address as confirmed, which makes loosing your money pretty hard to do as long as you do ship to that address and the tracking shows as such.
Anyway I don't really like how they treat these things. They remove the listing entirely. Like why? Now I cannot easily see who bought this to contact them, if necessary. Like why? And they removed my feedback left for the person. WHY! That was the most unexpected one as I am pretty sure that had never happened in the past. Then again I know I've had positives disappear randomly on me in the past, but I never kept that close track on them to notice.
It's just really strange. The form letter response is the same one they've used for years and it is just so vague and makes little sense and could put one into a panic. A person who never had one of these wouldn't know what the heck is going on nor if their money is safe. It makes no mention if I'll lose the money or not, just a lot of other bullshit that no one cares about as the first thing a person will wonder is if their money is safe or not. Ebay really half asses on these scary notices and one almost always has to call them up to sort things out. Not that you can get any real answers from anyone, the company is like Fort Knox and you only get lowly reps from India to talk to which are like robots and are impossible to talk to.
I know from experience that it's situational and depends on what Paypal says. I checked and it's a "protected payment" meaning I still get the money, but I also know from further experience that I could still get hit with something but these days it's super mega rare to happen.
Either way, I get no details at all about what's happening and it's "whatever" if I try calling either ebay or paypal about this. So I just wait it though and I'll probably be ok, but there is a small, like 1% chance, that I'm screwed.
It's just another part of doing business. "Expected losses" or what I like to call "theft", should total about 5% of your monthly sales. I keep about $100 a month earmarked for refunds and odd stuff like this. I simply do not worry about them when they do happen. Something will always happen to make you loose some money. You only should worry about the big stuff like that Canary Islands person who scammed me for quite a bit and work to prevent that from happening again. The only way I could have prevented this today from happening was basically to never sell video games, as they tend to have a much higher chance of happening.
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