Need some advice/opinions on "broken" hard drives i've sold

[T_Minus]

- Paypal will NOT try to take $ out of your bank or credit card to settle a negative balance. If you have proof of this occurring please show it, I've never seen any and I've gone to negative numerous times. Once time I had my account go to collections for 2+ years and not once, ever did paypal attempt to take $ from my CC or bank linked to the account. (I still would close your bank/cc to be 100%, never know I guess though.)

- They will send you to collections eventually.

- Once it goes to collections there are VERY SPECIFIC rules they must follow, if they do not you can fight it there and win. This is what I did. Read up on collections, and the rules for your city / state / county, do not discuss it with them over the phone require it all in writing, etc... make sure the collection company does not break any rules, provides the actual info they are required to by law, etc... I found numerous technicalities that were not followed, replied in writing, and bam they simply dropped the collections case against me and once they did that I had paypal 'look into' my collections, saw it was dropped/completed and re-instated my account.

I got scammed out of my items, and the purchase/$$ too many years ago, it sucked, and I refused to pay the ~$600 back to paypal for taking my $$ and letting customer keep the items.

 

[pricklypunter]

@T_Minus I have never been in the unlucky position to have had a negative balance on my account with them, so have no personal experience of how they would proceed with me to recover any debt owed.

Each country's financial rules are obviously applied differently, so they may or may not be able to remove the money directly from your credit cards or bank accounts associated with your Paypal account. I don't think they can do it in the US, but I could be wrong on that. They definitely can, and will if the sum is worth chasing, come after you legally with debt recovery procedures though, including making entries in your credit file with the various credit reference agencies if it remains unpaid, and have quite the reputation for doing so.

I seem to remember reading in one of their gazillion sets of rules and legal agreements, that you agree to abide by when using their service, that it depends on the type of account you have, whether your funding sources are verified or not and also something to do with the type of claim as to how they proceed. Ultimately though, they can only apply whatever rules of law are enforceable in the country in which the transaction took place. If that also happens to include garnishing your funding sources, they will start at your Paypal balance and work their way up the chain until they have recovered their money. Of course, the simple way to find out for sure is to write to Paypal and ask them how they will proceed.

I thought the op was in Europe, so he may be able to take his case to the ECC/ Financial Ombudsman for consideration, I also believe there may be time limits on doing this, so worth checking into as soon as if the money can't be recovered by other means

 

[ServerSemi]

If you accepted the return without questions you would've been in a better position right now. As is you got a ding in your record and I bet future cases will be decided against you more often than not. Blaming the buyer is not always a good strategy dealing with ebay/paypal.