Subject: Bargainland-liquidation (a.k.a warehouse86.com, a.k.a. Ernest Strahan)

A Titanium Powerseller whose incredible sales volume affords them total protection from eBay and PayPal's supposed Protection/Security policies. I approached both eBay and PayPal with detailed evidence of fraud on the part of this seller, with absolutely no results. The seller employs a simple yet brilliant scheme whereby they use two similar email addresses for PayPal payments: after winning an auction, when you pay through the proper links on the auction page, PayPal automatically sends the payment to payments-cad(at)bargainland.net (as per the seller's defined settings). Bargainland begins to send payment reminders, and when you contact them to advise them payment has been sent to payments-cad(at)bargainland.net, they respond by telling you that they have not received the payment and they never heard of that address, and that the correct address is payments-ca(at)bargainland.net (notice the difference? the "d" is now missing in "cad"). As the seller is claiming non-payment and is threatening to post negative feedback and to file a non-paying bidder complaint, you issue a second payment to the second email address, and then you file a claim through PayPal to retrieve the first payment. Here is where the seller gets downright fraudulent: they now respond to this claim using the supposedly non-existent first email address, and provide the proof of shipment (which of course is related to your second payment). Somehow, this scheme confuses PayPal, which denies your claim because all they know is they received proof of shipment for something. Bargainland now has two of your payments for one item!

UPDATE: It would seem that getting the proper authorities involved gets Bargainland to wake up...if you are having problems with Bargainland as I did, I urge you to take your complaint to the State of Arizona (where Bargainland is based), at the Attorney General's office; I filed a complaint against Bargainland (even though I'm in Canada), and Bargainland jumped to action when they got a letter from the Attorney General's office. Here's the link: azag.gov/consumer/OnlineInstructionsEng.html (external links are not permitted in these guides, so add the necessary "www."). My guess is, the State of Arizona has a public relations/image interest in keeping frauds like Bargainland in line.