Hi guys, I wanted to ask if you have any experience from something like this on eBay?
Days ago I sold a PS4 game there. It was sold at late hour and I was already in bed when I got the notification to my eBay app. I just checked curiously where the buyer is from and noticed he was from Russia, I was like ok, I’ll ship it tomorrow, now I’ll sleep.
But then next morning when I was about to prepare the package, I logged in PayPal and noticed there was an open claim for “Unauthorized payment”. That claim was made only like 15 minutes after the game was sold.
Well I responded to the claim with giving him a refund as I didn’t ship the game yet or anything. So from my side it should be all clear. Paypal has been reviewing it after my response for 4 days now, I guess that’s only to investigate if the buyer’s account was really being used by someone else?
Anyway I have no idea if this actually was a fraud or if the buyer just bought the game and regretted soon after, he could have sent me a message and I could have cancelled the order but he decided to go that way… Very strange.
The game I was selling is European version but those do work in Russia and all PS4 consoles play games from any region anyways so that can’t be the reason. I’m just skeptical if it actually was unauthorized as it was made so soon after the payment.
What do you guys think? I’m just curious to know if this actually does happen often.
There is a reason I do not ship to Belarus, Ukraine and Russia.
Smells fishy for me. I believe Russians are not able to make PayPal accounts anyway (or maybe they can nowadays) and for me it feels like he’s trying to use the PayPal claim just to make money by scamming the transaction. Stay on the ball, ping PayPal a few more times to get this sorted asap.
And; block Russia from shippable locations on your next auctions.
When I first started selling on eBay I had a string of extremely bad dealings with Italian buyers having their packages go missing before they got their. I researched further and found out quite a lot of people had consistently had these issues with the Italian postal system, so I decided to just block them.
Unauthorized payments are the new item not received. Back in the day, before most countries did their job and tracked packages, people used to falsely open item not received cases and get their money back.
I have 2 “unauthorized transactions” right now open on paypal. Both opened a month after they were shipped. Luckily they were fully tracked, so I am fine. Nonetheless it is a new pattern I see more often. In my opinion it is mostly buyers remorse, which is a thing of the past. Now a buyer can buy something, and simply say “I don’t like it” as a reason for return.
As mentioned by others, Russia can be shade city. Very popular products like video games, iphones, electronics in general always bring out the less frequent countries. I donated an iphone 4 to russia, because it didn’t fully track. Learned my lesson, and stopped selling any electronics outside of the US. I had someone from algeria who asked to buy one at full price, but only if I ship first class shipping (highest chance of no tracking).
Hopefully you don’t have any issue @xzini. If you refunded the buyer that should be everything. I usually call pp to get them to close the case. Most of the time they simply have too many cases, and forget about something more benign.
To comment on earlier responses, I’ve never had problems with Russia before, but then again those have been card buyers. Same with Italy, I’ve never had any problems and I’ve dealt with surprisingly many Italians. I guess it works better inside Europe to Italy than from other continents.
Thanks for your comment @smpratte thankfully I didn’t ship the game before this happened because it would have been too complicated to solve if I already shipped. I’ll take Russia away from 2 other games I have for sale just in case… I should be fine I think, if PayPal does nothing for a while, I’ll contact them.
I checked the buyer’s profile more closely and his eBay account says he is based in the US and his name sounds more American than Russian too but his address is to Russia… Maybe there is something going on after all, but we will see.
So the case is now closed and everything and he received his refund. I’ve got another question now - what can I do with the sold item on eBay?
I tried to cancel the order but eBay wants me to refund the buyer if I do that. He already has gotten the refund through PayPal. What happens if I hit “send refund” on eBay? He shouldn’t receive the refund again but I just want to be completely sure before I do anything
How can I get their customer service number? None of their Customer Service choices on the site are accurate for my situation. Plus, I wonder how is it to call them from Finland…?
*Knock on wood