Recently, a buyer returned the wrong item to me. A $110 item. I contacted him, and he acknowledged that his wife must have mixed up the return labels for two items they were returning. Buyers who are trying to get over on us deny their mistakes, or just ignore us because they know they'll get their refund anyway. So I believe it was a mistake. Nonetheless, I had to contact eBay to have the automatic refund stopped. I did that, and was assured the automatic refund was turned off. That was October 6. On October 8th, I got an email saying the buyer had been automatically refunded. I contacted eBay in the morning and they confirmed that it was an automatic refund which shouldn't have happened. I was told an appeal was put in and I'd hear something in 2 to 3 business days. On the 14th, having still heard nothing, I again contacted eBay. I was assured by that rep that I would be refunded and the appeal was being sent to a specialist. About 5 minutes after the call ended, I got an email saying that because I hadn't contacted eBay to inform them of the problem prior to the refund being issued, that the odds of me getting a refund didn't look good. I immediately requested a callback and explained the situation to a 4th CS rep. She was absolutely amazing and after about 10 minutes of digging, she found all of the records of my prior support requests. She wrote a report and said she included all the call codes from the prior requests so a specialist would see that I had definitely contacted them as I was supposed to. That was the 14th, and I still haven't heard anything. I'm certain the CS reps aren't to blame here, but something is happening.
