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Paypal Orders Buyer of Violin To Destroy It For a Refund
An anonymous reader writes "Erica was once the owner of an old violin that had survived through WWII, and decided to sell it on Ebay for $2500. The person who bought it decided it was a counterfeit and wanted his money back. Paypal decided to honor the request for a refund on the condition that the buyer destroy the violin and provided photographic evidence of the destruction. Couldn't he have just returned it?" Sounds like a hoax to me, but I guess it's possible.
Hey PayPal, ever heard of Photoshop?
The point is that it wasn't a fake, so PayPal royally screwed the seller.
But PayPal is entirely composed of evil douchebags, so I agree that it's not really surprising.
Yes and no... if it is a fake, then presumably there'd be no great loss in destroying it. However, it could also be that the buyer is mistaken, and the article is authentic. In that case, it makes more sense to nullify the deal (ie: return the merchandise and refund the money) rather than "nullifying" the merchandise.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
It isn't so much that the item wasn't a fake (though an expert did claim it was genuine), so much as that in the case of antique violins, being fake doesn't mean its worthless by any stretch of the imagination. So, PayPal had someone destroy an irreplaceable piece of history out of their own ignorant policies.
Whats to stop the person making the claim from popping out to a thrift shop, buying an old educational violin for peanuts (or lashing out a slightly larger sum on a cheap Chinese violin), and "destroying" that? For a $2500 refund, I'm surprised thay don't require the whole, unbroken violin to be returned to PayPal.
It's (ostensibly) a prewar antique. This isn't a fungible item. Paypal orders someone to destroy a counterfeit handbag, you might get reimbursed the cost of the bag if your take them to court, but that violin isn't coming back.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
If the seller doesn't want to pay for the return, fine they can agree to proof of destruction instead. But if the seller would rather have the item back, they should have the option to pay the shipping charges to have it returned.
Paypal doesn't have the ability to determine if the violin is really a fake, they shouldn't be the ones insisting on destruction of counterfeits.
Idiot.
Wow, you're a self-righteous fucking grade A idiot.
FTA: "It is beyond me why PayPal simply didn't have the violin returned to me."
It is beyond me why anyone uses PayPal. I feel genuinely sorry for the seller, but then again, caveat emptor. It's not as though there aren't thousands of well-publicized horror stories about these fuckwit douchebags - if you need a citation, just Google "paypal sucks" and check out a few of the 189,000 results. If PayPal were the last financial institution on earth I'd be keeping my money in my mattress.
It's said that we get the government we deserve - I guess that applies to companies as well. If people would just stop using PayPal then they'd change their ways or go out of business. But I guess expecting the majority of people to get their heads out of their asses, do a little research, and take a principled stand on something is asking too much.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
From listening to other merchants, turns out this is a known scam. Buyers take advantage of PayPal's policy of 'buyer is always right' and end up with both the money and the item, which they often turn around and resell. There have also been cases of people buying stuff, returning for a refund, and shipping back something else of much less value... with again PayPal supporting the buyer.
What idiot would pay $2500 for a violin online without hearing it. For that amount of money I'd have to have physically inspected it first.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
destroy an irreplaceable piece of history
Well, it is quite replaceable, just buy a violin and wait. Voila, an old violin. Personally I don't really see why anything old has an excessive value beyond its use.
Until someone invents a time machine, yes the law of supply and demand is pretty strict about the idea that old things can't simply appear in sufficient quantity to offset a high price due to scarcity. I suppose you would also like to insist that Jack Daniels tastes just fine as day old corn mash and that letting it sit in a barrel in an old building in the middle of nowhere for 11 years adds nothing to the value; a good number of people would disagree with that, too.
The pendulum of balance has been swinging wildly back and forth between buyer and seller at ebay. It wasn't too long ago that sellers were routinely screwing over buyers and leaving scathing negative feedback if they tried to get any resolution. (a buyer with ~25 feedback gets hurt a lot more than a seller with 10,000 feedback when each leaves the other a negative, and they knew it) That's why sellers can't leave buyers negative feedback anymore - too much abuse. I personally got burnt by a seller on two occasions there before they started adjusting things. (one cost me $156 - wound up with no product and no cash, PLUS a negative feedback, with a comment that made me look like the bad guy)
In a local sale, the seller is usually at a disadvantage - in most cases returning items is very easy, so much so that for common issues sellers have to specifically exclude returns due to abuse - like water pumps and generators in times of flooding and ice storms. Lots of abuse of buy-use-return abuse on tools too. A properly working buyer/seller system doesn't appear "balanced and fair" from a casual glance, it appears to be tilted toward the buyer. But in reality, that's where fairness lives.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I think it would be a good idea to sue Ebay Canada/PayPal Canada in small claims court.
The courts have already decided http://www.canlii.org/en/ca/fct/doc/2007/2007fc930/2007fc930.html that EBay Canada is a distinct legal entity. It would be interesting to have them show up in court to explain themselves. They would likely lose, and would definitely be out of pocket more that $2.5K just to put in an appearance.
Just because their dispute resolution policy says that they "MAY ask for destruction" does not defend them that they have applied this policy reasonably. The seller could reasonably obtain a judgment that the application of that policy was improper, in this instance, and that EBay has to cough up the $2.5K.
Yes. Hell yes. Defamation among many other charges should be filed against the buyer. The buyer is, as far as I can tell, were the real tragedy started. The buyer and the seller needed to work it out. Now if the seller decided not to deal with the buyer for the return of the item it's a problem but it would be understandable.
In the end, as far as I'm concerned, when dealing with transactions of over anything I can't afford to lose, I would take steps to ensure and insure the transaction. Among these would be, if it were an antique, to have it professionally identified and certified as such. Shipping such an item becomes a tricky thing... what's to prevent a seller from shipping a fake thing after having a thing identified as genuine? And then, what is to prevent the recipient from getting the genuine article and claiming it's fake, presenting a fake as their evidence? But by having a professional certify it before shipping and sealing the box himself perhaps that would offer a measure of security to the transaction.
This is all a very tricky situation where trust and convenience are at odds with one another. To achieve balance, "someone" has to assume risk over the transaction and hopefully they will be aware of who bears the risk. This way, the risk taker can then do his due diligence to ensure and insure the transaction.
It sounds as if in this and all cases, the seller is the risk bearer. And this is a good lesson for ALL of us whether we are buyers or sellers. Knowing in advance where the risk lies, one can decide for one's self how to mitigate and reduce risk or to decide if something is simply too risky to proceed in the first place.
This situation is tragic as it does not take into account the possible forms of loss which PayPal has created through its policies. They need to be fixed. But in the mean time, people need to be fully aware of the risks and who owns them. (For example, *NEVER* use ACH as the means of money transfers.)
What idiot would pay $2500 for a violin online without hearing it. For that amount of money I'd have to have physically inspected it first.
The kind that is scamming the seller?
True, and eBay still has many scammer sellers on it (though often the scamming has moved up and is sellers scamming resellers)... but I think the big thing here is they do not even seem to have a resolution process... PayPal is infamous for 'we internally decided X, you have no recourse, we legally own your money, you are not getting it back'. Their whole model is crummy.
So? That merely shows that Stradivarius violins really aren't specially wonderful sounding and throws into question their actual worth in terms of performing value. It says nothing about whether they can examine the thing and identify that it is indeed a Stradivarius as opposed to one made by some other guy.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
There's a lesson here: Don't use Paypal to sell any expensive items. If you're selling a bunch of things that are $10, then if you have a problem with some jerk-off buyer, it's no big loss. Plus, scamming buyers probably won't bother to scam you anyway, since they're not going to profit very much by scamming you out of a $10 item. If you're selling something that costs thousands at quantity 1, then use a different service; either have the buyer send a cashier's check, or set up a merchant account with Visa/MC (obviously not practical if you're only selling one expensive item, but if you have a business selling lots of expensive items it'll be feasible), or find a different service such as Google Payments.
It's the seller of the violin, not the buyer, that needs their money laundered. Presume that you, the buyer of the violin, is a rich drug dealer who bought $1 million in cocaine from a drug supplying cartel. Since you're a bit short of untraceable cash at the moment, and for some reason your cartel wants to legitimize their income and pay capital gains taxes on it, they sell you an "authentic" million dollar violin. You pay the money, get a crap violin and the drugs.
This assumes that your $1 million in cash had already been laundered, but needed to be used for a criminal purpose. If you had $1 million in untraceable dirty cash, you could have just bought your drugs with that cash and left the seller to launder his own money.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
This policy makes sense for about five seconds--"Hey, instead of giving a counterfeit item back to a seller so they can just scam someone else with it, destroy it!"--until you think about about a) the possibility of mistakes and b) the potential for abuse. At that point you say "Oh, right, that's stupid" and no one ever speaks of it again. PayPal is RETARDED for keeping it in place.
Sadly, eBay is still a HUGE (the hugest?) market for many kinds of goods, and they're tied in with PayPal, so it's a chance you take when you do business there. Just as you shouldn't take anything rafting that you aren't willing to lose at the bottom of a river forever, you probably shouldn't sell anything on eBay that you're not willing to take a loss on.
But yeah... this particular incident totally sucks. There should never be any kind of punishment without some kind of proof. No claim of any kind should ever result in automatic long-term or permanent anything, just like with DMCA takedown notices.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Next time you see a minor collision between a new car and a Chrysler from the 70's you will see that build quality has changed over the years.
Or if you climb out of your new car after the accident and the people in the Chrysler don't. The clever thing about newer cars is that in an accident they will crumble except for the passenger cell, eating up the energy so that the driver and passenger don't have to.
As wood ages it decomposes, warps, etc., and the "tonal qualities" of a violin would do the same.
A well kept violin will not decompose or warp. As wood ages, it also hardens, which allows it to resonate more when played. Further, the type of varnish applied to the wood plays an integral role in its sound, and that too can improve with age. In fact many new instruments are made from wood that's hundreds of years old.
Furthermore, I'd take a factory machined and produced violin over a hand-made one from a master any day.
So... how long have you been playing violin exactly? I've been playing violin 15 years and have studied with plenty of people who've been playing for life-times longer. I've never met anyone who would choose to play a cheap factory made violin. Constructing a violin is an art, not a science. You can program a computer to create a violin, but in my experience I have never played a violin that came from a factory that was even comparable to a hand made instrument. And I threw in China because all the terrible factory machined violins I've ever played happen to be from that country.
There's no reason a violin should be "worth" millions of dollars simply due to age/brand/rarity.
Age/brand/rarity are the reasons why almost everything has worth in the first place. Worth is all about perception. If I had millions of dollars, you bet I'd give it to play the violin I saw Jascha Heifetz play in black and white when I was a child. Of course that experience would be worth $0 to you, but that doesn't mean I'm somehow "wrong" for wanting to pay that much.