How I beat an online scammer and made $2,100 in the process

ryanckulp.com

16 points·ryanckulp··10 comments

That was a fun story. I like the way you write. Did you read any of the books on improving writing? Normally I'm not able to read posts this long but in this case it was easy.

Congratulations on the win.

thanks for the support and feedback.

one book i recall is The Elements of Style, often called Strunk & White: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style

otherwise i've not studied writing per se, just "practice" a lot in blog posts like this one.

my shtick is to add humor, remove qualifiers, stay conversational. all tips real writers would share too, but maybe not the same writers. ;)

Your style is also confident. I remember I read about that in the book "On Writing Well". That's also refreshing.

This wouldn't work with PayPal USA. They have a hard rule that Seller protection applies only to tangible goods received from a PayPal-recognized common carrier with tracking to the buyer's Confirmed Address. This would be an automatic reversal.

Beyond that, the buyer could do a chargeback through his card issuer. If successful, PayPal takes back 103% of the payment.

this was PayPal USA, i'm an American.

You lucked out... for now. Again, a CC chargeback will be hard to fight.

i find CC chargebacks (for us, they're via Stripe) more likely to win than PayPal tbh. and often w/ CC chargeback an accountant simply wasn't aware, mistakenly filed. PayPal, otoh, is often used by people with bad intentions on Day 0.

i enjoyed your story

thanks Julien! clever personal website btw ;)

thanks :)

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