So who's to blame for this EBay foulup?

Factual Questions
1

My Dad checked his credit card statement to find that someone had debited approx’ $1800 USD and then credited his account with it again. He checked and found it was from his Paypal account. This turned up to be from an EBay item in Hong Kong, a laptop my Dad hadn’t even looked at before he realised so much money had gone missing.
The guy selling the computer emailed back to say (in very broken English) that someone had tried to cheat him out of money too. EBay have emailed to say they’re looking into it and Dad’s going to have a few words with the credit card company.

We were wondering;

1.) Is it likely to be the seller or some random thief doing this?

2.) Is Paypal prone to this sort of abuse or is Dad just as likely to get his credit card account abused anyways by other criminals?

3.) As the cost of the item was in USD and we live in the UK the transfer cost Dad £60 due to the cost of currency conversion. If he is only liable for losses up to £50 can he claim that back from the CC company?

2

It sounds like your Dad didn’t order or buy anything at all from the vendor or a related party?

If so, then the CC company or Paypal will make good on it, after some time. However, I suggest that until then, your Dad cancel THAT CC and remove any CC info from his Paypal account.

3

I don’y know who is responsible, but make sure that your Dad doesn’t pay the conversion cost. I suspect that it’ll be like an overdraft charge - whinge about it and they’ll remove it.

4

It sounds like someone got a hold of your dad’s PayPal account password and tried to buy something on ebay with it. Then PayPal identified it and reversed the charge back on to your dad’s card.

He should make sure he still has control of his account and change his password. Not sure what he can do about the currency conversion problem.

5

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