There's an interesting discussion at another numismatic forum with regard to a type of ebay scam being carried out allegedly by a crooked buyer. The discussion relates to coins and I know we have a limited capacity to talk about coins and ebay here, but the same thing could just as easily happen in the realm of paper money.
CLICK HERE to read the original discussion thread. It's a long thread and I read only the first page, but here's the crux of what happened...
An eBay seller sold 20 coins worth over $10,000 to one person. One coin (which sold for $370) was erroneously described as MS-65 when it was actually MS-64. The seller acknowledges the error made in the listing but states that the picture shows the coin as MS-64. The buyer is not happy, but instead of returning the one coin for refund, he wants a full refund of the $370 purchase price or he threatens to return all 20 coins for a full refund of over $10,000 plus shipping. The buyer paid with PayPal. The 20 coins were part of a consignment that the seller is selling on behalf of someone else. In addition, the seller claims that he will lose 11% on issuing a refund including shipping. I don't understand that part at all. Even fully insured shipping should not cost $1,100, IMO.
The consignor offered to settle on a partial refund for the one coin, allowing the buyer to keep it as well as the other 19, but the buyer refuses. The seller is concerned that his reputation will be trashed if the buyer returns all 20 coins and leaves negative feedback on all of them.
What appears to be a clearcut case of extortion that should favour the seller is not resolved easily because of some heavy-handed rules favouring buyers using PayPal. My interest in this case is related to multiple items combined and paid for with one PayPal payment. In fact, I just had a situation where a buyer in Britain bought several coins from me in December, and he was not happy with one. Fortunately, he's doing the honest thing by returning the one coin so that I can issue a partial refund amounting to the cost of the one coin, not the entire payment.
When you sell several items to one person, and the buyer wants to file a SNAD (significantly not as described) claim for one item, is there really a significant danger that PayPal could forcibly return the
entire payment to the buyer?
If that's the case, or even if it is not, is it wiser to ask the buyer to return all the items purchased in one transaction because of the inherent dangers associated with PayPal?
Personally, I wouldn't have a problem asking a buyer to return all items purchased because I am not concerned by negative feedback. I am not a high volume seller who is dependent on reputation to sell stuff profitably. Having several seller accounts helps! If your reputation gets mothballed by one bad buyer, you move sales to another account and wait 1 year, after which time the negative feedback doesn't show in your feedback rating.
As for the financial losses to the seller, again I say I don't understand why he would be out so much overhead costs such that caving in the buyer's demand for a freebie worth $370 would actually be the cheaper settlement. I doubt that the buyer had inside information that he knew he could extract a post-sale discount like this, but there's plenty of room to believe that this kind of extortion could be more common than we believe. Anyone who makes a sale worth $10,000 is going to be put in a bad position if the sale is jeopardized. Not being a high volume seller, I find it hard to sympathize, and I make it a habit to not count my chickens before the eggs have hatched. Other people complain that PayPal holds onto your money and that it takes so long to access the funds in your PayPal account. I don't agree because you have to make sure your buyer is happy before you should touch the money deposited into your PayPal account, and that takes time, especially for international transactions where shipping is slower.
In the end, it's clear to me that the buyer is a crook. Why? Because he claims to have bought the coin based on the description instead of by the picture. If you expect me to believe that buyers read item descriptions and accept them like gospel truth, you're nuts!
Everybody knows it's the picture of the item sells the item. So the buyer must have known the coin was misdescribed and that the picture in the listing was of the actual item offered (not a stock photo), in which case his attempted extortion was premeditated, thus proving his intent to commit fraud.
So what do y'all think? Are high-priced combined purchases by a solitary buyer fraught with loopholes that can be exploited by a clever extortionist? Should sellers ask buyers to pay for all items separately as a potential safeguard? And most importantly, did I make this post way too long that most forum browsers have stopped reading long ago?
Canadian Paper Money
