[jhautz]

I personally cant get my brain around the trade thing over the internet. I ship my stuff to some guy who advertizes a trade and then when he gets it he ships his stuff to me. Way to much opportunity for scam IMO. Even if he does ship it, what if the item isnt as described you have no recourse at all. You traded taded you nice stuff for his crap.

As for Paypal disputes as a possible solution... Thats crap too. I filed a complaint for an item that was never shipped. I never got a confirmation or any response at all after the payment was sent. (this was all for an ebay item by the way) After a few weeks of no response I filed a dispute with Paypal. It went on for weeks with them requesting info on this and that. Finally the guy sent paypal a tracking number, but it was a bogus tracking number to an address that wasnt mine. Well... paypal didnt even bother, the just said that I loose the dispute based on any old tracking number being provided. Then I had to open another dispute and when all was said and done I won the dispute after about 2 months of screwing around I was refunded a whoping $0.81 out of the $125. Apparently the guy just emptied his paypal account and paypal wouldnt go any farther trying to get my money back.

In the end I called the Credit Card company for the Credit Card I used and refused the charges. They were most helpfull and just said they saw it all the time and stopped the payment to paypal and that was it. I had my money back.

After all of that Paypal then contacted me and whatned t know why I refused the charges for that trasaction and was looking for an explanation. I just forwarded the worlds longest email chain back to them with all of the communication of the entire dispute and that was it I never heard from them again.

Bottom line... Paypal offers no protection IMO. NONE at all.

I always use payment thru Paypal and use my credit card on the paypal payment so I have that last line of defense against a scammer. Your credit card company is your best friend. I also think that when you go to select credit card as the payment method for a paypal transaction they even bring up a whole screen try to talk you out of doing that and a bunch of stupid reasons why using a CC is bad. They dont want you to use a CC so they dont have to worry about getting payments refused when their system fails.