E: I guess this is just one of many possible ways to force a carrier to "lose" a parcel, enabling the fraudster to use the same ebay account more times without attracting complaints from sellers.
The trick described in the article just improves upon it slightly by making the seller think that royal mail lost the package. There's no dependence on this trick though, the scam works 100% of the time even if the seller receives an empty box.
Ebay will always believe a "hey my box was empty", no matter your account history. They'll just ban your account at some point.
At first glance the empty box seems pretty meaningless, it certainly won't win a dispute for the seller.
I guess you're right though, now the seller won't even realize that they're getting scammed and won't report the buyer account to ebay.
This is just a cost of doing business. Really sucks for amateur sellers though.
If the scammer is in the UK, there's always small claims court. I'm not even from the UK, and I got a scamming seller from there to refund me by just threatening to make a claim.
What? Think about it for a second, what proof would they have?
Stolen money makes no sense, this kind of trickery would have zero impact on chargebacks.
But it actually works both ways, this scam has happened on sellers and buyers.