I wanted to share this in order to help others.
I sold a 2015
ASE ANACS Certified MS70 on the bay. I was very rushed when I shipped it out and I did not notice the warning signs.
Later that day I see a Paypal dispute open up against me. Going back to
ebay I pieced together the whole thing. The Paypal user was a fellow by the Abdellah something, with an email address at a known email exchange. The
ebay user was a 0 feedback- just created (and closed by now) with a user name chat.ch.8l1lux8ix with an email address @mail.com
The shipping address was in NJ at a building with a suite number of 5 or 6 digits. The building (i looked up later on google maps) looked like a flat warehouse.
All the signs were there for me to identify a stolen paypal account. But I was too rushed to see it. I felt stupid that I had sent this item to a scammer.
I called Paypal - and was pleasantly surprised with their easygoing refund of my money and the scammed party's money. They took the loss under seller protection. My attempt to apologize for my foolish action was met with a gracious- "You did what you were supposed to do".
Got me thinking, however, that ultimately, we pay for that protection in our fees.
Lessons that I learnt:
Look at the address.
Look at the user name.
Look at the email.
Paypal customer service is A+.
Thanks for reading my rant.