I've used Paypal for some years now and have never been ripped off. For buying things from sellers who only accept Paypal it works out just fine for me. One of my only complaints is that Paypal won't let you add a credit card with an address outside of the U.S. As far as selling goes , I'd much rather a buyer pay me with a bank account transfer to avoid the 3.9% Paypal fee or whatever it is now.

It seems most people on ebay.de use bank transfers as a primary method of payment, so the level of trust is much higher among users than say ebay.com. (granted the seller has a perfect or near perfect feedback rating)

Like some others have said, just type the address in your bar manually and don't use links, delete emails from Paypal, etc.

I've been using Ebay since 1999 and Paypal since it started and have never been scammed or lost money. For higher value items I only buy from reputable sellers, and I state on all my auctions that I will only ship to a verified PayPal address. In addition when you receive the PayPal payment it will state whether the transaction is covered under the PayPal protection scheme, if its ineligible you should proceed with caution. Perhaps refund their PayPal payment and ask for a bank transfer/Cheque etc...

In general the benefits of using PayPal (speed and acceptability) far outweigh its cons. The only thing which galls me is that Ebay (who own PayPal) get two bites of the cherry in that you pay a commission on your auction and you also pay PayPal fees.

Thanks for all who chipped in so far (no pun intended).

The good suggestion of manually typing in the URI makes the most sense if you have control over it. What if you click a link on a web site that uses Paypal and gets redirected to something that looks similar to www.paypal.com, even with https (SSL), but is it actually the real PayPal? There were reported cases where even the genuine URI is image-masked to look like the real thing (in reality is some rouge sites elsewhere).

How do you deal with that in a safe way other than having to trust the original web site (with only PayPal link as payment option)?

you can use firefox with noscript and then permit PP to use JS each time you go to it.

and of course you need to ensure that you don't get yourself hijacked and some DNS nasty taking over either your hosts file or redirects your DNS queries to a rogue server.

basically, there is not a guarantee that you land on the real-deal.
I have a suggestion.. don't use them!
Regarding my negativity towards PP, I reserve every right to express myself... with the hope that you learn from my experiences.

Let me expand a bit:

1. There is nothing wrong with PayPal. The idea is a good one. Plus, it worked for a long time.
2. If you have had luck and nothing has gone wrong... Congrats! I also have had many successful transactions via PP.
3. When dealing with large sums, avoid PP. Reason is, they offer protection for non-payment... ONLY IF YOU ARE IN THE USA and CANADA. They even offered it to me, black on white... then backed out. They even offered, in writing, to cover the funds 100%... need I mention that they backed out on this promise as well?

Good luck!

Scott i just want to say i am so sorry for what happened to you, and thankyou for telling us all what happend to you, if only to warn us about paypal. I will be more careful of how i pay for things in the future

Some web sites are not designed to work properly with Firefox, unfortunately.

The DNS poisoning / hijack is not something easy to pick up or fend against.

From what I gathered, observe the following if PayPal (or others not so trusted payment means) is inevitable:

- limit to small amounts for each transaction
- use a credit card that is only for online web transactions (so that it can be canceled if suspicious activities were detected without affecting your main card).

rgds,

Thanks for sharing your PayPal experiences with all of us.

An interesting post:

eBay forces Aussies to use Paypal
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04...tralia_paypal/