County Court claim for ebay item sold however paypal refunded it last year?

[jayc001]

Hi All,

 

I have received a court claim form from a person a sold some goods to on ebay last year however to my knowledge paypal refunded the buyer after the dispute process.

 

The goods were used and tested by myself prior to sale. Sold on ebay via buy it now (I'm a personal seller not a business). Buyer emailed after receiving to say the goods were faulty. I troubleshooted the goods via email (computer goods and I'm an IT tech) however it was my opinion that they were not faulty and I initially refused to refund. The buyer got very angry by this with lots of heated emails so I chose to inform him how to raise the dispute via paypal (knowing full well that paypal always find in favour of the buyer) so they could deal with it and could refund him in the correct manner.

 

Paypal after a few days removed the funds from my account and they found in favour of the buyer as expected. The buyer returned the screen to myself and as far as I was concerned (until today) the case was over.

 

Anyhow today i received a court claim for the original amount (actually not sure if it original amount or plus return P+P costs). The transaction was from 27th July 2010 and I can't pull any info relating to it from either ebay or paypal as it's past the 180 day cut off. I've emailed paypal requesting all details relating to the case so awaiting their response.

 

The claim states POC to follow which I understand to be the "particulars of claim" so until i receive that i can't make my defence. Also the form to fill in to make defence is unreadable due to the toner being run out on the court photocopier (some brightspark still hand wrote the claim number on the totally unreadable form though!)

 

Has anyone any experience of someone taking them to court even though paypal have refunded them? Any suggestions on where to go from here?

[jayc001]

Well looks like I might be screwed. I can't pull any of the information relating to the buyer receiving a refund from my paypal account due to it being over 180 days. I contacted paypal via phone to request a copy of this information only to be told they won't give me it without a court order due to data protection.

 

So I need a court order to get details to help me defend my case in court? Oh dear!

[perplexity]

I have heard of an eBay case where the buyer sued over the cost of the return postage that a seller refused to pay. The buyer won and was awarded the costs, a good deal more than the £5 postage.

 

Was there no email message sent by Paypal when a refund is made? I get and keep all the reciepts they send when a payment is made for a purchase, so would have thought that the same should happen when a refund is made.

 

The most obvious need is to contact the buyer as soon as possible. It is extraordinary if something like this arrives completely out of the blue. The buyer should have tried to sort it out before resorting to legal action.

 

Can't help but think that there is more to this than meets the eye.

 

8-)

[barns66]

Hi.i should make sure that the claims form as come from the court,i'ts funny if court sent out a form that you can't read,due to toner cartridge running out of ink.It is possible i suppose but i would check,just in case.

 

barns66

Edited February 4, 2011 by barns66
spelling

[jayc001]

The claims form is defo from the court. The clerk there obviously isn't on the ball.

 

I don't keep emails over 3 months so I have no proof of the funds being taken from my account, I guess in future I need to.

 

Paypal are not playing ball. I've spoke to their complaints department and the following is what they sent :

 

Thank you for contacting PayPal regarding case id PP-001-xxxxxxxxx.

A solicitor or law enforcement officer must submit a court order to request information about a customer’s PayPal account or claim.

PayPal requires that legal documents be sent by mail to the following

address:

PayPal (Europe) S.à r.l. & Cie, S.C.A.

Legal Department

22-24 Boulevard Royal

L-2449 Luxembourg.

PayPal does not accept personal service, nor do we accept service via electronic means, such as fax or email.

Thank you for your time.

Yours sincerely,

Esther

PayPal

So with no defense available I guess I'm going to have to get my cheque book out

[perplexity]

gmail works well is for this sort of thing.

 

Because the archive of original messages is kept at their end, that is as good as you get in terms of authenticating the evidence, and it is easy enough to find the original with a suitable key word in mind to search for.

 

8-)

[ashmk]

Could you not send a Subject Access Request to Paypal to get your account details?

[perplexity]

Could you not send a Subject Access Request to Paypal to get your account details?

 

 

If as a matter of fact, they keep the details, I am at a loss to see why the information would not be routinely available, in the same way that a recent detail is.

 

Is there a conceivable benefit to paypal, to remove a detail except to save the space it takes, or to limit their liability by completely removing?

 

8-)

[mailmannz]

Jay,

 

I have just logged in to my paypal account, clicked on HISTORY and then did a search for my transactions between 10/1/10 and 09/02/11 and it came up with everything that happened in that period.

 

If I can search for payment data older than three months so you will be able to as well.

 

You should also be able to define a search in your ebay account for old transactions too. As Paypal is nothing more than the bank of Ebay, then you should be able to see the history of this transaction in their too (as lodging a complaint with one automagically locks the other and vice versa!).

 

There is also the possibility that if the guy complained to ebay, ebay would have locked your paypal account but then a few days later could have dismissed the complaint and then unlocked your account. Because of that you might have thought the money was paid back when it never was. So best you check ebay too.

 

Finally, from the wording of your letter from paypal, it sounds like they are referring to you as not being the account holder. There is no data privacy issues here simply because its YOUR data to start with.

 

But definately check your paypal history. I was able to search further back than three months by defining the search dates myself. If I could do that after 5 seconds you are going to be able to do this too.

 

Best of luck.

 

Regards

 

Mailman

[mailmannz]

PS. I had a contested transaction in my history (with a grippy customer), which shows up when I do my search...so if I can find this from June last year then you are going to be able to find yours too.

 

PPS. NEVER DELETE ANY EMAILS! Storage is so cheap these days that there is no excuse for not keeping copies of your emails.

[bub1]

Did the customer open a dispute through paypal or ebay? If opened through ebay it should be in your dispute folder.

As said above you can access old payments through paypal, if you know the dates go into veiw all transactions a date box or 2 should come up at the top then you just set the date you want. Also, there is a dispute folder in paypal and you can find it in there to. You need to use the drop down boxes alot.

 

It is quite easy to find.

[barracad]

Paypal after a few days removed the funds from my account

 

From your bank account? Or did you have available funds in Paypal? If bank account, then a bank statement will show the funds leaving your account.

[andydd]

As posted above (I just tried too, I viewed stuff from August 2010), you can view Paypal transactions older than 3 months so that should not be a problem, also did you have money in your Paypal account at the time (if so, not a wise thing to do !), if not then the money would of been taken out of your account via direct transfer or debit card from your bank account and you will be able to get proof of this.

 

Only keeping 3 months of emails is rather silly, its easy to setup an email client such as Outlook to archive older emails, this is very important for finicial stuff such as buying stuff online and using ebay/paypal.

 

If you can find no proof of the refund then you may be in hot water.

 

Andy

[perplexity]

The buyer got very angry by this with lots of heated emails so I chose to inform him how to raise the dispute via paypal (knowing full well that paypal always find in favour of the buyer) so they could deal with it and could refund him in the correct manner.

 

That is not the correct manner.

 

The correct manner is for the seller to agree to cancel the transaction, or to continue to be bound by the contract with the buyer.

 

A seller could otherwise elect to disagree with Paypal and proceed to sue the buyer for the money. Paypal owns no authority to affect the contract between a buyer and a seller, in any way. They have to do that for themselves.

 

8)

[Aginoth]

Well looks like I might be screwed. I can't pull any of the information relating to the buyer receiving a refund from my paypal account due to it being over 180 days. I contacted paypal via phone to request a copy of this information only to be told they won't give me it without a court order due to data protection.

 

So I need a court order to get details to help me defend my case in court? Oh dear!

 

That is a complete lie on the part of PayPal, It's your account, DPA has no bearing upon it as you are requesting information from your own account not that of a third party. Speak to someone more senior at Paypal

[perplexity]

If the buyer insists that a refund was never made but you are sure that it was, that is tantamount to an accusation of fraud, so the way forward is to report the suspicion to the Police, to investigate.

 

Simple.

 

In the mean time, the account owner is not the only one involved so Section (4) of the Data Protection Act may apply:

 

(4) Where a data controller cannot comply with the request without disclosing information relating to another individual who can be identified from that information, he is not obliged to comply with the request unless—

 

(a) the other individual has consented to the disclosure of the information to the person making the request, or

 

(b) it is reasonable in all the circumstances to comply with the request without the consent of the other individual.

[jayc001]

Just an update on this. I ended up paying the amount. It was pretty small £65 and was stressing me out getting now where with paypal. I managed to hold off as long as I could as the filing of the claim with the courts had a lot of errors and I quoted CPR as much as I could to try and get it thrown out.

 

Even when the amended particulars of claim came through I had a decent chance of defending it as the claiments facts were incorrect but worrying about it and having to take time off from work to attend court meant it was better for me to write a cheque.

 

Thanks for the help though.

[nat8808]

I realise this is an old thread but wanted to speak generally ..

 

ANY person can open a claim through the small claims court without even having ever met you before. If you just pay without contesting then you're just being taken for a ride.

 

This guy sounds like he tried it on and got double his money. I bet he wouldn't even have turned up in court.

 

All you had to do was print out your PayPal transaction history (they even provide it for you in various accounting program, spreadsheet and pdf formats) and you would have seen the money refunded on that date.

 

When you had gone to court with your evidence you can then counter claim for your time, the costs of taking time off work to defend.