So, you’ve bought what you think is a rare violin from eBay, but when it arrives, you’re not sure it’s the real deal. You get angry. You tell the seller you want your money back.
Then PayPal steps in and says they’ll refund the money, you just have to prove you’ve destroyed the violin. Which you do.
Sound ridiculous? Welcome to PayPal, which, after they decided to freeze Regretsy’s accounts because they were raising too much money for poor children, has apparently decided it really enjoys being a Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Which is funny considering the guy who founded it is a libertarian and should really hate things like this. Then again, he’s also a bit…eccentric.
The problem is that PayPal decided the violin was a fraud, sight unseen, and ordered it smashed, which the buyer gladly did, neither thinking to, oh, call an expert to give it a once-over or anything. The seller, for her part, is horrified that a violin that made it through World War II and that she verified with an expert got destroyed by some idiot in Canada.
PayPal, for its part, is too busy trying to convince one of its customers they’re a cockroach, because it’s funny.