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The Anatomy of Money-Mule Scams
Brian Krebs of the Washington Post's Security Fix blog has up an article on work-at-home money mule scams (backgrounder blog post here). These operations offer victims hundreds or thousands of dollars per week for moving money through their own accounts — a critical piece of the infrastructure for profiting from identity theft and phishing. The article links to the site of a UK fraud fighter named Bob Harrison, who lists hundreds of fradulent money-mule operations.
Last year I had someone send me a Money Gram money order to cash for something I was selling on craigslist. I was kinda suspicious when he asked to cash a check for more than I was selling the item for....
Now I have sold stuff online for years and can usually spot a fake immediatly...This one I had to take to a bank to confirm!
Someone had stolen a roll of blank money gram money orders and entered a valid serial number and everything. The only thing wrong was the micker ink. The numbers at the bottom of that check were standard ink, not magnetic...
I still have that check on my fridge.
....since you agreed to their Terms of Service.
I'm too lazy to look up a citation at 7:30 in the morning, but the last time I looked over the PayPal TOS it pretty much said "we reserve the right to take money out of your account whenever we want to, and your only recourse is to ask us nicely to have it back. Say 'please' and we might consider it."
Don't ever leave more money in your PayPal account than you can afford to lose.
For what it's worth, I think a court of law would have agreed in this case that the woman was responsible. It's impossible to really say without details of the eBay auction in question, but she took the customer's money. What she did with it after that is not the customer's problem. If she took his money in exchange for a service/product that she could not provide, she owes the customer his money back.