Just wanted to respond, person above said, "it is almost impossible to reach paypal customer service over phone"
Well, that is completely incorrect. I've had to call Paypal many, many times over the years starting around 1998.
I've almost always had excellent customer service and I almost always am able to get through to them in a reasonable time.
Ebay, you can get through in 10 minutes or up to an hour or more, it varies greatly. Rarely I've had to wait over two hours to get through to Ebay. On average I have to call Ebay once a week, and paypal once a month, so over the years that's a lot of calls. And it takes a huge amout of time.
Paypal now I'm starting to get foreign people on the phone, which has some good things about it but mostly it's bad.
The Ebay foreign workers are HIGHLY variable. You can get an extremely bad one, and call right back and get a very good one. I did that today, first one was really bad, second one was really super good. Amazing. You can really see the lack of training at Ebay, takes them a long time to get up to speed. But some of the foreign workers now have been around a few years, and they're getting good, thankfully.
Also the person said above that buyer protections, you're only allowed one per year, and that's just plain bizzare and totally false.
And saying Ebay wants to get it's share of the fraud, well, hehe there is some truth to that. Yes, Ebay can't be the police but knowingly allowing fake items to continue to be sold on their site is a real shame because they are facilitating fraud. I've even reported specific auctions and sellers to Ebay that are almost all from China, that are selling fakes, and I'm a certified professional in those specific items, and they took all my documentation several times over the last few years. Ebay's President's office promised to get to the bottom of the issue. And yet those items and those sellers from China are still selling those fakes. Some of the feedbacks from these sellers says things like "sold me fakes" "Sells fakes, beware" etc. and those sellers are still on Ebay. I myself purchased some of these items as examples so I could 100% verify these items were fakes, and yet those sellers are still on ebay selling items.
The real problem with fakes is this: Flooding the USA with fakes from China destroys the collectible markets for those items.
When you have Civil War Memorabilia, or minerals, or fossils, or collectible cards such as sport cards, and we have a market for these items in the USA, and many of the items have a great deal of value. Suddenly there are thousands of very high quality "replicas" of these items being sold as the real thing. The market value for these items collapses. Right now the USA is being flooded, for instance, with high quality Magic: The Gathering cards. Magic cards can be worth many thousands of dollars each. What do you think will happen to your Magic collections value when the market is flooded with Chinese fakes? It just ruins that hobby. The producer of these items is trying to make more counterfiet proof cards but it's not easy. The law enforcement entity for fakes in the USA is the US Seceret Service. I've actually worked with them on two cases. They're overwhelmed by the numbers of fakes, they're like a mosquito biting an elephant, almost completly unnoticed. It's really sad what's happening.
