311–320 of 398 posts
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Hence the insurance.
I fail to see how is the insurance would have helped in this case. No one disputes that the package was delivered successfully.
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The scammer had it sent General Delivery. For those not familiar with the term (it's not used commonly these days), it's possible to have something shipped General Delivery to any post office, then walk in and pick it up. See https://www.usps.com/manage/forward-mail.htm for more info. This seems like one of those arcane system hacks that's ripe for abuse. He/she presumably had to show some ID and sign something to ge…
You think general delivery is also his credit card billing address? Do you think he walks in with different fake ids every time he does this? Do you think he also uses different credit cards with paypal? Or do you picture him as a nomad, like the old guy from Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, traveling the country collecting fake ids, credit cards, and iphones? If he is super-master-ninja and all else failed, do you thi…
This would only work in major cities, but I always thought there was a business in having a physical escrow service aimed specifically at selling small, high-value items. You sell an item online, deposit it with the company (who takes a small cut; you could even mail it to them), who then pass it on to the buyer when payment is confirmed. The company can confirm it's in working order, and take some photographs for pr…
This would only work in major cities, but I always thought there was a business in having a physical escrow service aimed specifically at selling small, high-value items. You sell an item online, deposit it with the company (who takes a small cut; you could even mail it to them), who then pass it on to the buyer when payment is confirmed. The company can confirm it's in working order, and take some photographs for pr…
escrow.com does exactly that.
- It's a lot cheaper for ebay/paypal to let the scammers rip off people than it is to go after them, even when the facts clearly identify the scammer
- Casual sellers are both less able to detect fraud and are more greatly impacted by it
- The feedback mechanism is insufficient "insurance" against fraud
- "Seller protection" and "Buyer protection" are not suitable insurances against the kind of fraud that actually occurs
- The vast majority of transactions are legitimate
- The selling prices on ebay can be substantially higher than Gazelle/Amazon, or other reputable channel
- Fraud will undoubtedly occur in some cases
How about if a 3rd party sold real buyer or seller insurance? They would be in the business of identifying scam-like behaviour from buyers/sellers, help you to avoid fraud it can detect, and ultimately insure you from loss. Not sure how much the premium would need to be in order to make this work, but seems like an interesting idea.
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Having recently sold an iPhone on eBay and been concerned about problems like this, I wish eBay would allow non-professional sellers restrict bids to professional buyers.
Thousand times this. Their buyer filtering options are laughable. If they were to let me limit sales to people with certain types of addresses, purchases of certain value, a reasonable number of feedback, etc, that would be very helpful in reducing a chance of being defrauded
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> Eliminate VISA and MC, who are basically skimming 2.5% off our retail economy. This claim doesn't make much sense. For example, an economy with RGDP 150,000 units, of which 2.5% go to Visa/MC, is not worse off than one of RGDP 130,000 units, of which 0% go to Visa/MC.
That's a false dichotomy – there's (at least) a third option – a service that doesn't skim so much off the top – 2.5% made sense when credit cards were a rarer payment method, used only for a small fraction of transactions. Now, nearly everyone has and uses multiple visa or mc branded credit or debit cards, yielding trillions in transactions, making billions for Visa/MC. In short, they've grown much more profitable d…
Still, money handling/cheque handling has costs as well.
Cheques are much more prone to fraud, money has some fraud cost (% of fake money, not sure how it is, but it's not that big) and costs of handling and moving the money (hence, cashback reduces this cost)
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You think general delivery is also his credit card billing address? Do you think he walks in with different fake ids every time he does this? Do you think he also uses different credit cards with paypal? Or do you picture him as a nomad, like the old guy from Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, traveling the country collecting fake ids, credit cards, and iphones? If he is super-master-ninja and all else failed, do you thi…
Dude, funny reply, but I never said that he was un-findable. The parent suggested sending a subpoena to the shipping address, which isn't likely to work in this case. Also keep in mind that the OP doesn't have the guy's credit card number, PayPal does -- and I bet they are not handing it over.
But, yes, sending to shipping address is unlikely to work.
Paypal will turn over the info if you subpoena them (you will have to open a miscellaneous matter in california and subpoena them there, but this is not a big deal).
If you are law enforcement, they will turn it over much faster, but unlike Google/et al, they generally do not object.
In fact, here's a great example of this: http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/califor...
"Google has not produced documents, paypal has" :)
They are in a pretty different position, so i can't blame them. Your bank would turn over records in response to a simple subpoena as well.
Unlike your bank, Paypal will give notice and time to object to the guy, but if he objects, he will have to do so in court (and then you'd know who it is or otherwise be able to sue them directly as a doe, and so it won't matter), or paypal will turn over the records.