Follow up to this article here: Ebay and PayPal Appear to Cover Up Fraud Ebay and PayPal APPEAR to be colluding with these frauds as they have registered this guy 3 times.  Each time he uses the same method.  Same address. If you are a user of PayPal then you need to know that if you are paid by an international user they can reverse the payment to you up to 1 month down the line NO QUESTIONS ASKED. I’ve put off writing this article because I do not want to educate the scammers but its apparent that alot of people do not know the PayPal payment spin maneuver.  If you sell internationally what are you going to do to protect yourself ?  More importantly we need to as honest sellers team up to squash these con men out.  For all the promises of "coverage" by Ebay and PayPal they will drop you like a hot rock and you will be out the money if you are suckered by one of these international criminals. Below is an example of a person that clicked on one of my eBay auctions: borisbursh ( 11)  AKA  alexrokoma ,  rterehov

      

Member since May-10-06 in Ukraine

 

Positive feedback rating GREAT BUYER EASY TRANSACTION A++ Seller:         

agsbiz ( 35)
Jul-11-07 18:30
Positive feedback rating GREAT BUYER EASY TRANSACTION A++ Seller:         

agsbiz ( 35)
Jul-11-07 18:30
Positive feedback rating A+ Buyer Seller:         

connor25 ( 214)
Jul-11-07 16:02
Positive feedback rating GREAT Item and Price, Fast Shipping, Would Do Business Again! :) :) :) :) Seller:         

dizzyvinyl ( 557)
Jul-11-07 12:56
Positive feedback rating Fast Payer. Thanks for the business!!! Seller:         

jarmstrong52 ( 24)
Jul-10-07 13:59
Positive feedback rating a true ebayer spot on Seller:         

tony666z ( 2305)
Jul-08-07 05:23
Positive feedback rating perfect transaction quick and efficient Seller:         

nestorpiliplok ( 39)
Jul-08-07 02:26
Positive feedback rating Good Ebayer, Fast Payment Seller:         

aryaboy2005 ( 16)
Jul-06-07 22:33
Positive feedback rating Fast-Excellent transaction - many thanks and enjoy!!! Seller:         

goodwatt ( 1664)
Jul-06-07 06:59
Positive feedback rating fast payment great ebayer A+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Seller:         

paulandshaz ( 114)
Jun-29-07 06:59
Positive feedback rating timely payment , good communication , reliable instructions ,thanks for purchase Seller:         

bowmaster300 ( 29)
Jun-29-07 05:36
Positive feedback rating Hope to deal with you again. Thank you. Seller:         

maerosemedia ( 36476)
Jun-26-07 01:06

 
The contact info that came with this clickage is: Dmitriy Kovalivnich 49-17 Zelinskogo st. Mariupol, Donetsk 87556 Ukraine.  He used this same address multiple times to register on ebay.  Ebay registered him with a new user ID each time.
 
Do you see anything suspicous about this profile ? You should. 
 
Observations: While the account was signed up for over a year ago all the purchases recorded in his feedback are very recent within a short interval of time. 
 
How can the sellers improve their security?  The payment was reversed on Jul-13-07.  That same day his profile showed up the dreaded Not a registered user .  Thus ebay knew there was something wrong.  And since ebay owns PayPal you can assume that PayPal knows something was wrong.  Yet its very likely neither ebay or PayPal will cover any loses on this.  When he clicked on my auction I tried to get Ebay / Paypal to cover my loss.  They refused.
 
What the users did wrong was post feedback before a month after payment had lapsed.  At the one month point it becomes challenging to get PayPal to reverse.  The first users all happy jackass-like posted positive feedback the minute they received payment.  They have thus unwittingly help bilk the later sellers.  They look and see 100% positive feedback on a growing number of transactions and are lulled into complacency.  Had the sellers waited this guy would have had a feedback number = (0) and everyone would have been very wary. 
 
Generally I use the following verbage for buyer criteria in my auctions:     Buyers outside the USA must have:    
  • at least 20 points with 100% feedback rating for a period that exceeds 3 months                    — or –    
  • at least 50 points with 98% or better feedback rating for a period that exceeds 3 months 

What this does is make it a whole lot of work for the scammer to generate a feedback profile. It also costs them some money to generate it. In the case of honest or mostly honest foreign buyers it also puts them on notice that if they want to buy from the largest surplus pool in the world, the USA, they have better not reverse any payments.   When I sell outside the states its always stated as an "AS-IS" with no returns and I am not responsible for loss.  This is because generally speaking any sort of signature from an item shipped via USPS costs a pile of money.  Thus your only practical choice is a fire and forget shipping method.  Thus by using my stipulations it highly discourages false claims that a package did not arrive.  Also having been out of the country I have seen what a big favor we are doing when we ship out of the country.  Prices are quite elevated from some things in other countries.  The buyers there simply have to accept some loss as the price of getting really good deals.  If you need proof of this check www.MercadoLivre.com.br pricing on computer equipment. 

I have a few other highly secret techniques for spotting these scammers. I won’t divulge them because it could possibly help the scammers and make the techniques useless. The take away lesson of this article is DO NOT LEAVE FEEDBACK FOR AT LEAST ONE MONTH AFTER YOU ARE PAID VIA PAYPAL.  You might still get some losses but you’ll slow them down because you will make it harder for them to sting others. Ebay / PayPal is trying to expand their business by increasing their international transactions.  This is because the domestic market is saturated.  However they will do this at your expense.  Don’t expect alot of coverage from them.  They won’t give it.  And I deduce they do not want you to know that !

UPDATE:  Paypal will pretend to be investigating for 1 month before actually clearing a payment reverse like this.  During this time they will be hoping your temper will cool down and you will forget about the issue.  My theory on that is do not get mad……..Get even.   You can get even by spreading knowledge in this article to the people you know.  Let people know that PayPal is a dangerous form of payment.  This is because they portray themselves as safe to the unsuspecting seller and in reality the payment can be reversed like this.   PayPal / Ebay knows about this but keeps it quiet.