Some guides for buying violins that go back to 2006 which say to ignore the labels on violins.<p><a href="http://reviews.ebay.com/Buying-an-old-violin-on-ebay?ugid=10000000001308663" rel="nofollow">http://reviews.ebay.com/Buying-an-old-violin-on-ebay?ugid=10...</a><p><a href="http://reviews.ebay.com/What-apos-s-in-a-Name-A-Guide-to-Labels-Inside-of-Violins?ugid=10000000001631923" rel="nofollow">http://reviews.ebay.com/What-apos-s-in-a-Name-A-Guide-to-Lab...</a><p><a href="http://reviews.ebay.com/Violins-on-Ebay?ugid=10000000014298167" rel="nofollow">http://reviews.ebay.com/Violins-on-Ebay?ugid=100000000142981...</a><p>Paypal TOS Covers counterfeit items:<p>10.1 b <i>Further, if you lose a [Significantly Not as Described] Claim because we, in our sole discretion, reasonably believe the item you sold is counterfeit, you will be required to provide a full refund to the buyer and you will not receive the item back (it will be destroyed). PayPal Seller protection will not cover your liability.</i>
<a href="https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=ua/UserAgreement_full&locale.x=en_US" rel="nofollow">https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render-c...</a><p>If Paypal decides you sold a counterfeit item, you lose the item and your money.
To answer a couple of questions:<p>1. $2500 is a mid grade violin. I have a 100yo Czech violin that is worth $250. Sears specials for Jr. High students can cost $100.<p>2. The seller is right that the Label doesn't qualify as intentional counterfeiting. My Czech violins says its a Strad. This is extremely common, and should be taken more like a 'inspired by' tag--unless of course the maker is reputable enough to place their own tags.<p>It seems to me that the problem is paypal's definition of counterfeit shouldn't be expanded to cover objects where you truly need an expert to determine the counterfeit status. Knockoff rolexes are on thing, but at least from the post, it seems they are taking the buyers word, and don't understand the nature of violin labels.<p>Also, isn't PayPal owned by eBay? Aren't there thousands or even tens of thousands of counterfeit items littered across eBay?
It seems to be, that most of PayPal's PR blunders result from heavily regulation of stupid employees. I know we don't tolerate personal insults here on HN, but those of you who have spoken to as many PayPal reps as I have, will probably agree that there are few other ways to describe them. I guess their logic is: "If we can hire dumb people for less money, and regulate them so they can't make mistakes, we can save money! Genius!"<p>Honestly, this just goes to show how important hiring really can be. Someone with enough common sense to say "hey, that doesn't seem right" would eliminate so many of these problems.
As a musician, there's something genuinely <i>horrific</i> about the destruction of a musical instrument.<p>Whether it's the fault of PayPal or not, I really hope whoever has done this gets what they deserve.
Note: the story only mentions the end result, not the path to that end results - so we only have a partial story<p>I've been through the PayPal dispute process as a buyer several times. It can only be escalated to a PayPal decision after communications between the buyer and the seller have proved unsuccessful / broken down, as in the seller doesn't reply, or refuses to sort out the situation. It doesn't happen overnight.<p>It's not clear which way this went, but after negotiating with the seller proved fruitless, and then being forced into raising a PayPal dispute, then again the seller failing to resolve the matter forcing an escalation to a PayPal decision - this led to the path of destroying what was claimed to be counterfeit materials.<p>So the seller knows that violin labels are a contentious area, thus perhaps should have been more accommodating and resolved the issue without forcing the buyer to escalate.<p>From the buyers perspective, being asked to destroy an item they claim is counterfeit as a pre-requisite to getting his money back seems a rather straightforward step.<p>Clearly the buyer and seller disagree with the authenticity of the item - but that should have spurred the seller to remedy the situation rather than force an escalation to a PayPal dispute. That way the seller wouldn't have lost out.<p>The seller's failure to resolve the situation appropriately, before the buyer felt it necessary to escalate a Paypal dispute is part of the problem here. I guess the seller was playing hardball instead of negotiating in good faith. And by playing hardball and failing to resolve the problem initially, the seller loses.<p>Where the seller believes that they sold an authentic item, and the buyer disagrees, isn't it logical for the seller to offer a good faith refund and send-back without forcing the buyer to raise a paypal dispute and then escalate it when no resolution could be made?
Yeah. I'm selling some old stuff on eBay, using money to buy newer stuff, drawing the difference from the bank when the PayPal balance is not enough. Repeat.<p>After not even two cycles of this, I get an email from PP saying:<p>> <i>Starting MM/DD/YYYY, money from payments you receive will be placed in a pending balance for up to 21 days. By doing this, we're making sure that there's enough money in your account to cover potential refunds or claims. [...] We reviewed your account and determined that there's a relatively higher than average risk of future transaction issues (such as claims, or chargebacks, or payment reversals). We understand that it may be inconvenient to have your payments temporarily held but please know that we didn't make this decision lightly.</i><p>That's right. You didn't make this decision lightly. You made it out of greed. You're simply looking for ways to keep my money longer than necessary in order to accrue interest, or whatever. How is this legal? It's my money.<p>Fortunately, I noticed that selling stuff on Amazon is not too different from eBay. So I'm thinking to move my transactions to Amazon and stop using PayPal altogether.
In the other recent paypal PR debacle I don't think paypal deserved the level of vitriol that was leveled at them. Regretsy screwed up by operating in a way that would have caused most banks to shut them down, but it was horrible customer service on paypal's part that turned it into a disaster.<p>For this I would like to hear more details of the story but I don't see how paypal could possibly be in the right if the facts as presented are in any way accurate, this is abhorrent.
Step 1: Buy expensive Violin on eBay/PayPal.<p>Step 2: Dispute Authenticity. Ask for a refund / offer to smash as proof.<p>Step 3: Buy and Smash Cheap Violin and send PayPal photos as proof.<p>Step 4: Profit!
About 3 years ago I had to deal with a counterfeit item bought on ebay. In such cases an experienced seller usually offer full refund no questions asked, this is the best policy and saves time and the item, though the seller loses shipping charges they paid when the item was initially shipped and the buyer has to pay the return shipping, sometimes to make the buyer happy, seller even offer to pay return shipping. These small loses are usually considered as "cost of doing business on internet".<p>Paypal use to require the buyer to prove that the "assumed" fake item is actually fake. In my case Paypal asked me to obtain a certificate either from the original brand or some authorized dealer. If I would have gone that route I had to pay for appraisal fees and spend time shipping/taking item to the authorized dealer. I guess this was Paypal's measure against every other buyer crying fake when they start feeling buyers remorse.<p>I hope Paypal has not changed their policy of asking for the counterfeit certificate, making it too easy for buyers to claim fake items.
Not saying this didn't happen, but let's wait until we see something a little more official than a random claim on a blog that's known for its bias against PayPal before flipping out.
I don't see at all where the seller refused to have the item returned. In fact, in both paypalcomplaints.org and Regretsy.com, the seller said:<p>"Paypal instructed the buyer of a vioin (sic) I sold on Ebay to DESTROY the item rather than return it to me..." - paypalcomplaints.org<p>"Rather than have the violin returned to me, PayPal made the buyer DESTROY the violin in order to get his money back." - Regretsy.com<p>So it looks like the seller tried to get the violin returned, but PayPal wouldn't issue the refund until it was destroyed.<p>Though if someone has that information elsewhere, I'd love to see it.
Wait, isn't $2500 very cheap for a violin? I seem to remember the rather mediocre violin I had as a kid costing more than that (such hopeful tiger parents).
I'm surprised the dispute got this far. Normal SOP on paypal goes like this.<p>1. Buyer pays for expensive item with credit card through paypal.<p>2. Buyer receives shipping confirmation.<p>3. Buyer disputes credit card transaction.<p>4. Paypal customer service says "LOL, should have sold it locally. We don't recommend using our service for items like this."<p>5. Buyer enjoys free $2500 violin.
Paypal's destruction of counterfeits policy is intended to combat counterfeiting of designer items. It's application here seems lame-brained to say the least.<p>I'm curious how it got into Paypal's dispute resolution process however. In the only other original post I could find on the matter the seller says she sold the violin through eBay <a href="http://paypalcomplaints.org/paypal-told-buyer-to-destroy-item/" rel="nofollow">http://paypalcomplaints.org/paypal-told-buyer-to-destroy-ite...</a>. Normally this would have gone through eBay's dispute resolution process first.
This is incredibly disgusting behavior. I have so much respect for the founders of PayPal, but current management is destroying their company and, sadly, their reputations.
"They somehow deemed the violin as “counterfeit” even though there is no such thing in the violin world."<p>Are you kidding me? Of course there are counterfeit violins. Just like there are counterfeit art pieces.
I took violin in 6th grade and all of our student models had the "Stradivarius" label. The teacher said about half the violins in the world had a label like that, it was just the style.<p>PayPal's actions and those of these anti-counterfeiting fascists make me sick. How long until they start organizing "counterfeit violin" burnings in the streets?
A lot of people are talking about finding an alternative to PayPal.<p>Does anyone have an opinion on Dwolla or Square?<p>I have also heard that Visa is getting into the P2P payment space, I suppose Google Wallet must have similar plans.
This makes me sick. Ordering to destroy? That makes absolutely NO sense to me. If someone told me this story in person, I would have thought that it was a joke. Paypal is right up there with godaddy on the list of worst tech companies.
Disclaimer - I used to work at eBay but my work was not in any way connected with policies on counterfeits or Paypal. So the following is my speculation only.<p>While this specific case does sound awful, I'd bet that eBay/Paypal's draconian policies towards counterfeits is a result of number of lawsuits that designer labels have filed in the past against eBay. It would likely be impossible for eBay/Paypal to physically examine every item that is claimed to be counterfeit, so the blanket policy which lets them claim in court that they are doing everything reasonable to prevent counterfeit items being traded on eBay. Again, this particular case does suck, but honestly I think the real villains are the Louis Vittons of the world.
The way I see it the buyer/destroyer should be sued.<p>A sale was agreed upon. The goods were delivered. The money wasn't.<p>Buyer simply did not hold up his end of the bargain and should be taken to court.<p>In my simple view, PayPal does not even enter the picture. Or is there more to it than that?
Maybe I'm just utterly lost here, but I'm hoping someone can fill me in on how or why PayPal would have told anyone to destroy something they hadn't paid for? This seems rather ridiculous if it's true, on so many levels.
The initial problem here is a single PayPal employee that either didn't read the case well enough to understand the item involved or just doesn't care about antiques or violins (or both). Either way: an employee that doesn't actually care about customers and only abstractly cares about getting his job done, which is probably handling hundreds of similar complaints a day. I can't really blame him. The result sucks, but the system necessarily produces some excesses, because guarding against them is too expensive. Welcome to an corporatist, capitalist world with individualistic employees. It doesn't optimize for human happiness, only for added economic value, independent of who benefits from that value.
This invites a very lucrative scam:<p>- Buy an expensive antique using paypal for payment<p>- Wait for antique to arrive<p>- Dispute its authenticity<p>- Once PayPal destroy order arrives, send photo of cheap replica I destroyed.<p>- Get my money back AND have an expensive antique for free, which I then sell to a local antique dealer.
I couldn't find on the Internet a Bourguignon Maurice priced at less than $10.000. This certainly looks as if the seller tried to make an "irresistible offer" with their chinese violin that even had a inkjet paper label inside.
On the one hand, I can see why that particular clause (10.1b) is in their TOS. They don't want you (be you the buyer or the seller who got the item back) to re-sell the counterfeit item, costing PayPal the fees, and all of the lost time on the dispute.<p>However, there should be a reasonable limit, whereby if the item is >£x value, or is claimed to be an antique (or similar), an independent professional who can identify it will be hired -- and charged to whoever they side against (i.e. whoever made the false claim).
The thing is if an item is counterfeit and paypal allowed payment to proceed they could be litigated. If a third party imported counterfit goods and didn't take due action they could be fined and / or lose their license. Paypal does this to minimize risk and effort (cost) involved, whether this is a good way to minimize risk is apparent but than again this is paypal.
Something doesn't sound right here. Does the OP have any correspondence from PayPal showing that it indeed instructed the buyer to destroy the violin? Is it legal for PayPal to instruct and for a person to destroy property like this? Without some sort of third party mediation? Could the seller have offered to pay for an authentication?
This is a tad ridiculous. Very few of you know anything about violins and I'm sure none of you know the details of this story or if it's even true. Regretsy was being irresponsible in posting it without any evidence and many people here are behaving like key members of a lynch mob.
So the moral is, if you are selling a big ticket item, don't accept paypal. There are many cases where it just gets reversed, and the buyer is always right.<p>When selling something like this, accept cashier checks, money orders, bitcoins, etc. You need need it to be non-reversible.
Even something counterfeit is worth something, so the seller is still entitled to sue (for the value of the counterfeit good). The object would then be re-valued during the trial and the seller liable for the full amount. Is this correct?
One thing I don't understand is why didn't the buyer just contact the seller directly and try to return the violin for a full refund? Was it sold under the terms all sales final?
Congressional hearing please.<p>My only hope is that congress usually destroys instead of fixes whatever it sets it's eyes on, so PayPal would be doomed.
I can't believe the buyer didn't reflect over how awkwardly wrong it was to destroy someone else's unpaid-for property on the request of a third party (PayPal). Breathtaking stupidity.
The <i>funny</i> part of this story is in the comments section. A bizarre number of strangers seem to be "cut up" or "I'm crying" over an inanimate object that isn't even theirs!