This happened to me a couple days ago! Thanks to @azulryu for linking me back to this thread and thanks to the OP for bringing this to the attention of the forum. I will also add this info to my Common eBay Scams and How to Fight Back thread.
This is a pretty complicated scam that allows the scammer several different ways to be successful. Here’s how the scam works:
You (buyer) purchase a listing from scammer (seller). For the listing I purchased, the seller was located in the US. The eBay username doesn’t matter, they’ll just create a new account.
Scammer marks the item as shipped, likely without including a tracking number.
Scammer uses eBay customer support chat to impersonate you. The warning sign that you may be affected by this scam: You will receive a chat transcript from eBay support even though you never contacted them. From your purchase, they have:
Your shipping name
Your zip code
Your phone number (I believe there’s an eBay tool that lets them get this info, or they can get it from eBay customer support)
They will not have all of the information to authenticate as you, so sometimes they are not able to work over the eBay customer support rep. For example, for the OP, the eBay rep tried to authenticate the scammer by asking for the OP’s birthdate, which the scammer does not have access to.
The scammer will give the first rep the tracking number that shows as delivered. The scammer probably did not include this tracking number when they marked your item as shipped, so this will probably be the first time you see this number. This tracking number has two issues: 1) the shipped and delivered date will be before the date you purchased the item on eBay and 2) The origin location will almost assuredly not match up with the seller’s PayPal address. You can use this info later in your discussions with eBay/PayPal. They will claim that the item shows as delivered, but that they haven’t received it, and would like to open a case.
Once the case is open, they will then contact a different eBay rep attempting to close the case. “Oops,” they’ll say, “I found the package, my bad. You can close this case.” If the eBay rep falls for it, the case will be closed.
At this point, your item has been marked as shipped (but not actually shipped of course), and an item not received case has already been open and closed for this listing. Fast forward however long you’re willing to generally wait for items, and the item never arrives. My guess is that, if the scammer is able to get to this point, you as a buyer will not be able to open a case through the website. You’d have to contact customer support and backtrack through all of the actions that have already taken place for this listing. There also may be some sort of “payment settlement” that happens when the case is open and resolved, such that the pending funds in PayPal are able to go through. I do not know 100% if that’s the case, however.
Here’s what you can do if this happens to you and you catch the issue soon after the impersonation attempt:
Immediately after you see the chat transcripts with the scammer impersonating you, contact eBay customer support by phone. Both the escalation team and PayPal rep were unfamiliar with this open-and-close-case scam, so you’ll need to do some work explaining that the seller is trying to impersonate you to open and close a case using chat and that this is an ongoing scam. If you’re able to communicate this fact to them, they should be able to add notes to your account and listing that will make it harder for the scammer to be successful via chat.
Next, file a dispute for the PayPal transaction. PayPal would really prefer that you keep eBay problems on eBay, but filing a dispute on PayPal accomplishes two things: first, the dispute will prevent the scammer from receiving the funds, and second, the PayPal dispute will be able to be solved and your money refunded quicker than waiting for the eBay estimated delivery date to pass, which is how long you’d have to wait in order to create a case via eBay. PayPal is very familiar with the tracking-number-that-has-already-been-delivered scam, which is all the scammer has left at this point (if they even respond to the dispute at all), so this dispute should be resolved in your favor pretty quickly, and your money will be refunded.
If you didn’t catch the scam until much later:
Unfortunately, if it’s been a significant amount of time since the listing, it’s likely the scammer has gotten away with the funds. However, you are still covered by eBay’s buyer protection, so you will just need to go through the painful task of peeling back the layers of the scam through eBay customer support (contact them by phone). There are probably several different ways that they’ll be able to identify that you were scammed, mostly due to the chat logs and the incorrect tracking number that was used to open and close the case for the listing.
But wait, there’s more?
My scammer tried something a little bit different than the above in an attempt to get the funds cleared in PayPal. When I first bought the scammer’s listing, the payment didn’t actually go through. eBay marked the listing as paid for, the “order successfully placed” screen showed, but behind the scenes in PayPal, the payment was cancelled and the payment amount was refunded. PayPal didn’t email me about either of those things happening, and I’d never seen that happen before. After messaging the seller a bit, he mentioned that he had contacted eBay and that there was an issue with his PayPal account that he was able to resolve. He’d just need to cancel the current listing, then relist the item again for me to purchase. However, there was an additional step he wanted me to take: To verify the cancellation, I had to confirm that I had received the refund. Since I verified in PayPal that I had indeed received the money back, I was fine with doing this. He relisted the item and I purchased again, and all looked correct in PayPal.
For some reason, my scammer stopped trying the open-and-close-case scam. From the customer support chat logs, it seems like he didn’t have the correct tracking number, which meant he wasn’t able to show the rep that it had been delivered but he couldn’t find it. He stopped speaking to the customer support rep shortly after the rep couldn’t get the tracking number to load.
Instead, he changed course with the scam. Soon after the unsuccessful chat, he cancelled the second listing. He sent me another message, saying that he had cancelled the listing and refunded my money, and wanted me to again verify that I had received the refund, as I had done for the first listing. However, I checked my PayPal account and confirmed that he did not actually refund me. If someone was being careless, they might confirm that refund and let the scammer get away with the money, so just a heads up.