Well, PayPal was absolutely no help. Got an CSR with an accent which is unusual as normally when I call I reach someone in the USA. Her advice was to just refund the buyer if I was uncomfortable with the purchase. I tried explaining to her (again) that a) I cannot refund the buyer due to the error message I receive when I tried to do so via PP originally for the excess postage (Msg: "This recipient accepts PayPal payments only through their website."); and b) I can't just refund the buyer, I would have to cancel the order via eBay and the only legitimate way for a seller to do so without earning a defect is "Problem with Address" and there is no evidence that the address was incorrect.
She advised me to just cancel the order via eBay using the reason "Item No Longer Available" IOW, OOS. I started to explain to her that doing so would result in me earning a defect from eBay, but just gave up and hung up. (Nice to know, PP has its share of space cadets, too...) 😞
Attempted to call eBay and during the 45 minutes I was to be on hold, did some additional Internet sleuthing myself. Was able to track the email address provided to a Facebook account. Name on FB account is the same as where I was asked to ship the item. Searched through the person's FB friends list and was able to find someone by the same name as the person who ostensibly purchased the item and set up the guest eBay account. So, at this point I am assuming since the two people know each other that Person A must have bought the items and asked that they be shipped to Person B, who knows why but perhaps as a gift.
So, am going to ship the items out and hold my breath there will be no issue down the road such as an UA claim and/or CC chargeback. PayPal BTW, didn't seem concerned at all that the phone number associated with the PP/eBay account was fictitious. I never did speak to anyone at eBay as I hung up once I found the above-mentioned "FB Friend" association, but you'd think they'd want to know the phone number provided by the account holder was fraudulent -- or at least have their software up so that it would refuse to accept non-existent area codes to preventsuch problems in the first place. {shaking head}
One more thing... When I called PayPal, their automation system said they couldn't find my account given the phone number I entered. My phone number is the same as it has been for 20+ years and is clearly visible and correct in my PayPal account. When I mentioned this to the PP CSR I was told that "it's a glitch in our software -- and sometimes the automation system says it can't find an account by phone number even though the phone number provided is correct."
So, if any of the rest of you run into this problem, just double-check your registered phone number on PP is correct and in your account, and ignore what PP's automation system says. Of course, this makes it all the more difficult trying to navigate through their automated system and finally get to a live person but what else do we all have to do, right?! {Sigh}
