I've disputed a PayPal credit card charge for $900 for a laptop I bought on eBay from a guy who scammed over 20 buyers. They reversed the charge and since law enforcement was involved, it was eventually settled in my favor. That's one reason I will *always* use my credit card with PayPal.
With Amazon, I expected that sellers were better vetted than this, if this truly turns out to be a scam. However, Amazon does have the final responsibility given their policies. You can dispute *any* charge with your credit card. This will temporarily take the charge off of your account so you don't incur finance charges. It will also launch an investigation. Typically, most credit card companies require you to wait until it has posted to a statement before allowing a dispute.
Wow, I consider you lucky.
Disputing credit card charges with PayPal may or may not work--so my rule is don't bank on it.
I also was scammed by someone through paypal. PayPal didn't even respond to my complaint. My credit card company, which has always backed me up many times and often for very high charges (always resolved in my favor, too, so not like I go around disputing appropriate charges), claimed they were unable to do anything because the seller is a third party.
PayPal actually states this explicitly in their TOS. The CC pay PayPal, not the seller. PayPal pays the seller. So from the CC point of view, a dispute wouldn't resolve in the buyer's favor anyway since the chargeback would be to PayPal (which fulfills its obligation when it relays the money to the sellre).
I don't know if your case was recent or not, or if you got lucky, or if PayPal actually resolved the issue through its own dispute management channels (especially since ebay has protection channels, as well). But please check carefully before putting all your faith in the power of credit card disputes. I also thought exactly like you did before this occurred. I was unpleasantly surprised and actually quite upset at my credit card staff and supervisors for a little bit. But they've always been good to me up until then and I didn't want to burn my bridges.
Basically, I don't use PayPal for anything I don't feel comfortable losing money over.
(sorry this doesn't help the current posters having trouble on amazon).
I did find this out however, and then I'll read through the entire thread to determine the details: hopefully you purchased the product through official amazon channels. These scams run on amazon a lot. I went through a similar thing with a laptop that was priced too good to be true.
I contacted the seller via email as requested in the description (which was my second hint to watch myself, the first being the low price). Then he replied (actually I repeated this process for three other low sellers to get a feel for what was going on). and wanted the money sent through Western Union. At that point, I contacted Amazon's and reported the activity as possible fraud. The description stated that the products were elligable for protection, but if the transaction isn't processed through Amazon's official channels, they aren't liable for anything. I wish amazon would monitor this type of behavior more closely, but I think these scammers pump multiple accounts and items into the system throughout the day, which makes it very difficult if not impossible to track it all.
sorry for the book! but I hope this helps in some way. my bad for not posting this sonner, could have saved some people some trouble it looks like. I just kept passing over the thread, sorry for that.
