note: posted this in buyer central and got no response.
Hi all. Got a new scam that ebay is falling for but we are not going to fall for.
About feb 1 or so we bought a "new" printer printhead for $34 CAD all in from a china seller (they do not exist outside of china). It arrived april 1. Put it in the printer and it is faulty and throws an error code of faulty printhead and is completely non functional.
(put the old printhead back in and it works fine except no magenta as that colour is plugged, the reason for buying a new printhead)
So the next day we open a return case for item not as described.
Of course since then the seller has tried everything to not refund. He cannot send a return label obviously. Shipping to the china return address he gave us in the return claim is $43.29 for tracked packet and the seller did not want to pay and repeatedly wanted to refund 20% partial refund.
We called ebay to step in and they converted the return to a case and put it on "hold" for 5 days and instructed us to give the seller our paypal address to send the return shipping $ to or they would close the case in the sellers favour so we sent our paypal address in an ebay message. The 5 days ran out and ebay states we need to return the item first and that is the only option. Seller says return at our expense and he will refund return shipping and original cost upon receiving the item back.
See where this is going... $34 + $43 = $77 CAD. He is not going to give us that amount back we just know that. The scam keeps evolving...
So we call ebay again. They put it on hold again until april 20 they say to give seller enough time to send $43.29 to our paypal.
Seller this morning sends $43.29 to our paypal however he has sent it as for merchandise that he has "bought from us" and we get charged $1.99 selling fees. The shipping address (his) is in chinese with no english at all on our end in paypal. Canada post cannot use the chinese version whatsoever.
He then sends an ebay message with a screenshot from his end of the paypal transaction. The return address in the original return case is not there anymore for us to compare to after running the chinese version through google translate.
We then send the english translated version of this new return address to him in an ebay message for him to "confirm" with us that it correct.
So now he says just keep the $43.29 and keep the faulty item and close the ebay case.
Now this is where the new version of the scam becomes clear. Why would he refund us $10 more than the items original cost?
If we do this and close the ebay case and throw out the item then he has up to 180 days to make a paypal claim since there is no tracking number from us. He well win and get the $43.23 back and we still pay $1.99 in fees and loose the $34 original ebay item cost.
It specifically says: "Ship to the address on this page. Save your tracking or shipping info."
Now we need to convince ebay of this and I think they will not see it.
