A very important yet conspicuously very hard-to-find fact about PayPal's Buyer Protection program, is that should you choose to request a refund from a seller, the amount of your refund is not first determined by the value of the item you purchased, but rather how much money is in the PayPal account of the person from whom you are trying to obtain a refund. In other words, if you paid $50 for an item and never received it, and you apply for PayPal Buyer Protection and the seller has only $15 in his PayPal account, then you will only get $15 back. Because of this, I consider PayPal's "Buyer Protection Program" to be misleading if not fraudulent, because it is a program with a major failing. You as the buyer may be led to believe that you can take a risk on sellers with poor feedback ratings because the risk is mitigated by PayPal's "protection", when in fact you are assuming full risk because you cannot know a seller's intentions and you cannot know a seller's account balance. The worst part of this supposed protection program is that ultimately it means that PayPal (owned by eBay) is released from any financial responsibility for hosting bad sellers and allowing them to carry on business on eBay. I was ripped off by a guy who was listing fake auctions and just taking people's money and running; however, I was able to obtain his information and learnt that he had actually defrauded many people on eBay for thousands of dollars, yet all PayPal ever did was repeatedly send him emails asking for his co-operation in resolving the buyer disputes. Useless! Pay with your credit card and get proper Visa protection.