Another Ebay Bogus Listing

The images he sent to me do NOT match what was pictured in his listing.
Absolutely amazing.

If the buyer paid by Paypal, he/she can obtain a refund merely by requesting same. Paypal no longer cares why a refund is being requested.

Jenny,
Let's say the seller gets paid via PayPal. PayPal certainly would take the money back if the funds were still available, but what happens if the guy immediately takes the money and then goes dark? PayPal has no real recourse, they wouldn't be able to chase him around in France. Would they just eat the loss and refund the buyer anyway? This seems hard to imagine given ebay and PayPal.
Don

Don, Paypal still refunds the buyer and pursues the seller for reimbursement including by legal channels if necessary. Paypal has a presence in France, so that is not an obstacle.

The backs of the stamps are interesting as those are expert marks from German Bundesprufers. Schlegel and Dr. Dub are two well-known ones and, while I'm not intimately familiar with their work, I highly doubt they expertize classic American stamps. Even if the marks and stamps were genuine (which they're not) the marks wouldn't carry much weight with US buyers, anyway. It would be like trying to sell an expensive German stamp with an APS cert to a German buyer, the cert would basically be meaningless.

Jenny,
A presence in France is a far cry from hiring someone to even find a person. A slick person could easily disappear and we are also making a giant assumption that the original account was built with someone's real identity in the first place. I am sure that the seller would send something so he would have proof of delivery. This moves the dispute to 'it is not as described'. As Chris pointed out, there is plenty of room for debate on that point. Does PayPal have staff that can makes stamp authentication decisions if they could run down the seller and drag him into court?

Has anyone seen or heard of PayPal eating this large of loss on a single transaction? Has anyone seen or heard of the level of legal efforts they are willing to make if a seller just disappears? (A quick search didn't reveal anything I could find.) I am sure that they eat small losses but I can't help but feel they wouldn't make it easy on the buyer for a transaction this size.
Don

Edit: I would add that it is very possible to open an PayPal account without a bank account in your name (or in a bogus name). Heck, there is even YouTube videos on how to do this. So if the seller has a bogus PayPal account, I have no idea how they would even start to try to find him/her.

The upper limit for Paypal buyer protection is $20,000. Proof of delivery is invalid for transnational transactions.

This one is open / shut as far as paypal and ebay go. The seller has made too many references to real stamps.

I got a rueful laugh out of this page in this "collection:"




Note the 1c in the upper left corner.

Compare with this pic of the famous 1c Z-grill in the collection of Bill Gross:



That stamp is presently on loan to the National Philatelic Museum in Washington,DC. The only other known example is in the Benjamin Miller collection at the NY Public Library.

Somebody must have found another example with the same Philly cancel as the one in private hands. <chortle>

Not knowing about many things,
I would have fallen in love with this scam.
Being goofy sometimes, I would have read
right by the warning signs! Wow.
Thank you all for an enlightenment!
I am not close to this bidding level, but still
the thought is scary!

Essayk, That page was beautiful! If I could have
afforded it, I might have been fooled.

rlm, you don't work for Mattel, do you? (Wink.)

Mattel: Toy Company Loses Over $3 Million in Internet Wire Scam From China, Report Says
The Associated Press reported Mattel received a fake email said to be from CEO Christopher Sinclair asking for a new vendor payment to China. Authorities reportedly said the funds cannot be recovered.

KGB, No ties to Matel. My three children always
got to shop at Hasbro Employees's Christmas
sales. Sister, in law was a mechanical engineer for them.
My kids were lucky to be test children.
Just outside of Providence R.I.

There was supposed to be 108 pages with links, missing only 24 stamps. What links, wouldn't you want to know what's missing? So he didn't bother to show the 1869 Pictorials, the Columbians or Trans-Miss, etc. What legitimate collector/buyer would bid on an almost complete collection that they can't even assess? I wonder what this collection would really be worth if it were legitimate? I wonder if the winning bidder thinks he scored!

Certainly very strange all-around. If the buyer is legitimate (I am sort of doubting it now) I do think he will recover his funds and they'll go after the seller. The seller did list it under:

Stamps > United States > Collections > Lots

It would have been good if ebay had paid attention to the notices from knowledgeable collectors on this forum. But my experience is that almost everything like that goes into the virtual circular file.

ebay will continue to ignore stuff like this until some high profile case(s) make the news, at which point they'll talk a good game for a few days and then go right back to ignoring them. It's not that I think ebay approves of this kind of thing, but they're not about to allocate any resources in the form of people (and salaries) to police it.