The United States Postal Service doesn't care if I've been defrauded by an Australian scammer. They delivered the parcel to the address provided by eBay on the label, and that's as far as their responsibility goes. For what it's worth, the scammer has not yet done anything with the return label I paid for, but what I don't think any of you seem to understand is I'm dealing with a vindictive troll here, and he'll almost certainly wait until the last possible moment to mail it back, because he knows my funds are frozen until he gets a refund.
That's how these scammers operate. They hold sellers' funds hostage in hopes that they'll just write the item off and issue the refund (OR they know that a lot of first-time victims will accidentally issue the refund when purchasing a return label, because the buttons are WAY too close together on the same page, and if I hadn't already been warned about that, I would have probably made the same mistake).
This is all retaliation for cancelling the initial sale, for which now more than ever I feel perfectly justified. I was instantly suspicious when he waited until after the purchase to ask all the questions any idiot would ask BEFORE buying an $850 box of old trading cards, he ultimately violated eBay's policy by attempting to change the terms of the transaction after the point of sale (and that IS eBay's policy, whether some of you naysaying devils' advocates like it or not), so I cancelled the transaction. Less than an hour after relisting the box of cards, he bought them again using a sockpuppet account with 3 feedback (and by the way, my buyer settings are supposed to prevent anyone with less than FIVE feedback from purchasing my goods, so there's another bone I have to pick with eBay). His account clearly shows he's in Australia, NOT California. Yet he filed a SNAD less than 24 hours after the box was delivered to the 3rd party California shipper.
And now for the next 3 weeks, my eBay store is dead in the water, because I don't get paid until I issue a refund, and as stated above, this jerk is either going to wait until the very last day to send the cards back, or he never intended to send them back in the first place and I'm going to see them listed one by one on his own eBay store. Either way, he wins and I lose, because if he keeps the most valuable cards and only sends back the commons, I would only get up to a 50% refund (that info is straight from eBay customer service). This is an absolute nightmare, and I have EVERY right to be angry at the scammer, at eBay, and at community members here who think the answer here is for me to "calm down," "suck it up," and "move on." $850 might only be a pittance to some of you, but it's a significant amount of money to me.
There was absolutely no way to protect myself from this happening, and there's no way to prevent it from happening again and again. eBay's "seller protection" policies are toothless, unenforced, and meaningless, and every single seller on this platform is at risk. Some of you apparently won't believe or understand that until it happens to you.
