Latest developments....

I called PayPal about this first thing this morning and got a very helpful chap in Arizona.

He took a look at our history and that of the buyer and immediately agreed that from what he could see this looked very much like a repeat scam buyer. He could clearly see more than I could but would not let on any details.

But becasue we had not used a trackable means of mailing he could not find the case in my favour, but he wanted to. The best he was able to do was to rule a NO-FAULT closure of the case. Now this means that the buyer actually still gets a refund from PayPal but we don't lose our money either. He could see that this was giving the buyer what they were after but with the PayPal policies he could not rule how he wanted to in our favour.

Then he suggested I call ebay because in his opinion they should remove the NEGs from our account.

So I then called ebay...

They also took a look at both our track records and once again becasue we had not used trackable means of postage the case was not clear although the CSR wanted to remove the NEGs. She said they would be doing a detailed review and would call me back during the day with a result, but so far no call. And the NEGs are still present. So we are hopeful we will get the NEGs removed as well.

The one good thing according to PayPal is that there is now a (another!!) claim of missing item dispute on the buyer's account. If I could read between the lines this particular buyer is pretty close to having her account closed down at least from PayPal. But he said even if that happens they just go on and open up another account under another ID and/or address and carry on as before. There seems to be no real way to stop them. But he did say that PayPal were actively engineering ways to prevent this kind of buyer from operating.