Web Blog of Greg Mathews

As someone selling perl scripts online you are a target for fraudulent paypal payments and as long as there are idiots online that fall for every spoof email around asking for paypal details that will always be the case.

This week though has really concerned me, in August one script was purchased twice by the same person, this is not as strange is it may appear as some people do do the right thing and pay for more than one copy of the script if they are using it on different sites, however Paypal did not like the look of it and carried out one of their investigations. At the end of August they decieded they transactions where fraudulent and cancelled them, refunding the buyer in full for each transaction.

I was suprised then that this week, paypal has opened another dispute for each of the two transactions stating that the buyer has now asked their credit card company to issue a chargeback. For those that don’t know a chargeback is issued when the buyer claims they did not receive the goods or they where not as described etc.

Paypal claim that they defend the seller in this situation and fight the chargeback if there is evidence that it is unjust. If that is the case then why have they opened these disputes asking me to provide any evidence, surely they can see when filling the dispute that the orriginal transaction has been cancelled/refunded by themselves already?

I did submit my evidence pointing out they had already refunded the buyer, I then tried telephoning Paypal which, from the UK, turned out to be a waste of time, it was a fully automated system that kept asking your to press this or that and then eventually sending you back to the paypal website.

I then emailed paypal, asking for clarification on the situation, and you guessed it, three days later I am still waiting for a response and the disputes are still ‘being reviewed’. I have never known a ‘Chargeback’ go in the favour of the seller, will I be pleasantly suprised this time? I’m not too hopefull.

If the chargeback is granted this opens a whole new issue for me with paypal, I sell something for £xx and the buyer then gets twice that in refunds, isn’t that theft or fraud?

Greg