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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.
Comply with PayPal's shipping requests in a timely manner.
For SNAD Claims, PayPal may require you to ship the item back to the seller - or to PayPal - or to a third party at your expense, and to provide proof of delivery. Please take reasonable precautions in re-packing the item to reduce the risk of damage to the item during transit. PayPal may also require you to destroy the item and to provide evidence of its destruction.
For transactions that total less than USD $250 (or local currency equivalent), proof of delivery is confirmation that can be viewed online and includes: recipient's (seller's) address, showing at least city, postal code, state, or country (or equivalent), delivery date, and the URL to the shipping company's web site if you've selected "Other" in the shipping drop down menu. For transactions that total USD $250 or more, you must get signature confirmation of the delivery.
Emphasis mine. Note, I found this at the original article over at Regretsy along with a picture for those of you who are lazy.
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Well, at least everyone involved has a crazy story to tell: "Gather 'round children and let me tell you about the time I had to destroy a hundred year old violin in a timely manner. FuhrerMarks had instructed me -- back then they were known as 'PayPal' -- to destroy the violin after a dispute about its label
My work here is dung.
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.
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.
1. But $100 violin, then claim it's a fake
2. Buy $5 violin, smash it up, send photo to PayPal
3. Profit!
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.
I sold a 24-port Fax board on eBay via PayPal when I decommissioned our internal fax server and went to an outsourced model about 3 years ago. The purchaser filed a claim with PayPal and said they could not get it to work. I asked for the item to be returned and I would refund. Instead PayPal reversed the money without them returning the product. I am not sure if they required them to destroy it but I lost the money and the fax board and it was a working device when it shipped. I have not sold on eBay or used PayPal as a seller since.
My work here is dung.
It's the world's smallest violin, playing just for... DAMMIT, PAYPAL!
Smashing idea! Simply smashing!
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.
Were this just an isolated incident, I would be screaming hoax with the best of you; however, given PayPal's handling of a recent charity case, where a group had their account suspended after trying to raise money to buy presents for poor children, I'm not so sure. Quote PayPal's support: "You can use the donate button to raise money for a sick cat, but not poor people."
http://www.regretsy.com/2011/12/05/cats-1-kids-0/
The problem in any case is, if the buyer swaps the violin, how do you prove the buy swapped it, or didn't?
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
And to play devil's advocate, the seller could have just as easily authenticated the $2500 violin and then shipped the buyer a $100 fake.
Long signatures suck.
the bass bar shape has changed, the neck has been lengthened, the fingerboard has been lengthened, the neck has been mortised, the tailpiece, bridge, pegs, have had their shape changed. It doesn't even have original catgut strings! Antonio Stradivari wouldn't recognize this. Burn it, so that others may not have it, either.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
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.
It would be nice if you could also see the feedback weighted by the sell price. A reseller could sell hundreds of $2 items legitimately but run a scam for high value items selling less frequently and still maintain a fairly good feedback balance.