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@mastersoftheshoeniverse wrote:

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Well said. Too many people take the 'easy' path and these thieves are then empowered to continue their thievery.

 

Of course, the OP could well be rich enough to write the loss off. They don't seem interested in upholding the interests of society in general if it costs them any effort.

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I spent hours - hours - pleading with ebay frontline staff, supervisors and managers in live chats, trying to get them to hear my side of the story.  I fought tooth and nail to get ebay to acknowledge the incredibly sus nature of this buyer's claim, including his ridiculous demands that I refund him without his sending the item back.

 

At every turn they ignored my attempts to get them to see reason.  For any sellers reading this in the future, here is a list of things ebay will not care about:

 

• your perfect feedback score
• the great feedback comments you receive
• your very very very low transaction defect rate
• your well-formatted and numerous item images
• your attention to detail with buyers, including going over and above whenever you can
• your calm, professional tone with demanding, obnoxious buyers who are obviously scammers
   

Ebay will instead robotically enable even the worst buyers.  Do you have 50,000 100% positive feedbacks and a buyer claiming he didn't receive his item because he saw it beamed up by aliens?  They will be given the benefit of the doubt.  And ebay may even reflexively turn on you with the bloodlust normally reserved for lions eyeing wounded antelopes or something.

 

 

As it turned out, the bad guy doesn't always prevail.  Ebay decided in my favour.  If I can find a way to edit my original post, I'll explain how it happened, for the benefit of anyone else who has to go through this.

 

 

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Firstly, I am so glad you won out against that scammer. That is great news and it also shows, I think, that you did take the time to collect the evidence to prove the scam.

In regard to your comments above, where you say ebay takes no account of those things such as perfect feedback etc, I am not tryin to be an ebay apologist here but in a way, they can't let those things determine a decision. Every case has to be decided in its own merits. I agree that if you have a seller with such a long and strong good record, you'd think a rep would be keeping that at the back of their mind but they would still need some supporting evidence of a scam, which is, I think, why countess was suggesting a parcel opened in front of reliable witnesses was one option.

I think in one way, you were very lucky. You had a scammer who sent back an empty box and so the weights of both parcels were very clearly different. Had the scammer put something in the box to make the weight more feasible, it would have been a lot harder for you to prove a scam as you would probably have opened it at home, unsuspecting. I am glad it worked out for you.