it is not about crying, at least I am not crying, it is about alerting others and doing something against scammers, ebay, and paypal.
But it is good to expose the scammer and paypal and ebay for what they are, this post may have helped some people on this forum by alerting them of this situation, the problem with paypal is not with bitcoins, it is a problem in general, paypal or ebay has not sent me a single email the problem was because it was a transaction with bitcoins.
I lost very little, but others lost a lot, and it is very sad to see this type of fraud take place, and for paypal to encourage the fraud to take place.
Not trying to fight the fraud would be the wrong thing to do, I know paypal is probably going to burn me, and all the other guys that got scammed, but it is worth a try to try to do something about, and then lose, than to give up immediately and act like paypal not do anything, and actually encourage the fraud.
This problems somehow affects us all, for example you buy something from a legitimate vendor, then you have to pay a little extra, since the legitimate vendor has extra expenses due to fraud, and to cover for fraud he has to increase his prices, the legitimate customer is then force to pay this extra prices, for any business if the operational cost is increased due to fraud, that cost is passed onto the customers.
The problem with ebay and paypal is that the play a huge role in the market, they have become so big, that they do not care about their customers, and posts like this is that make people aware of scams.
If paypal continues with its scams, and people complain in forums, blogs, etc, paypal will fall, I will not be surprised that in 5 years from now bitcoin is the big thing, and no one gives a shit about paypal, when that happens I will know that we have won, so a short term loss is no big deal, but if no one does anything, people accept paypal behavior as acceptable, then 10 years from now paypal will even be worse than now. that is not something that is acceptable. This post will help many in the long run, and I predict there will be many more scams like this by paypal, until its downfall.
Once paypal begins to fall they will listen to their customers and service will improve, but by then bitcoin will be big and strong, ebay will probaly start accepting bitcoins as a form of payment in about 5 years, otherwise it will be lost sales to them.
I really doubt any of the sellers will get their money back, but it is worth a try, at the very least paypal gets exposed for what it is.
I do not expect to get my money back due to everyones experience with paypal, but posting paypal as a fraudulent enterprise, and having my prediction of paypals downfall in 5 years, and to have bitcoin strong as ever when paypal colapses, and to have contributed to paypals downfall even if it is a very tiny amount, it is worth a lot to me, that alone is probably worth infinitely much more to me than my lost btc.
This post probably helped many more people from being scammed.
In regards to seller protection, it does not seem to work, when I received the email of paypal payment from the scammer, the email said I was eligible for seller protection, but then after the charge back no word from paypal on seller protection, I even asked them about the seller protection and have got now replay, it has been more than a day and no word from paypal, seller protection seems to be an scam.
QFT
Also, does anyone know how I can stop PayPal taking the charge back from my debit card? I withdrew money from the account before the charge back claim was made and subsequently I have a "negative" balance. I expect PayPal to find a way of taking that money from my bank but would obviously prefer that not to happen.
It is so incredibly easy for eBay/PayPal to detect auctions with "bitcoin" in the title/description and have them automatically removed, the only reason they are not doing this is to disrupt the bitcoin economy. I didn't even realise bitcoins were forbidden to be sold on eBay until this fiasco.
I don't like some of the comments in this thread ("greedy people getting scammed, oh dear" etc..) - that does nothing but make the bitcoin community look weak in front of one of our major rivals. PayPal is actively pursuing bitcoin because it realises the massive potential of bitcoin. We must stick together and stop this sh1thole of a company.
