E-Bay/Paypal : Buyer Beware
I was surfing thru Craig’s List recently, looking for a used car . There were 2 scam themes which became readily apparent. The first was the divorcee who got a car as part of her settlement but doesn’t need a 2nd car so she’ll let it go for a song. The second was the military man who is about to be redeployed for an extended period of time and wants to dispose of his car quickly. What both of these scams had in common was the seller insisting on using E-Bay and/or Pay Pal so that both the buyer and the seller would be protected.
Unfortunately, I have had experience doing transactions this way and the buyer is NOT necessarily protected. In my case, once the money was put into the seller’s account, the seller was free to withdraw it.
If the buyer has a problem with the purchase after payment has been made he has to go through a process which can take at least 30 days before Pay Pal determines what the resolution will be and even then he may have to wait for money to show up again in the buyer’s account before he is reimbursed. It seems to me that an easy way to at least partially deal with this disadvantage to the buyer is for Pay Pal to freeze the monies in the seller’s account for 30 days to ensure that there are no issues. But then again, who asked me?