I thought that this is what the end result might be. It happened to me once. I was happy to get the money but annoyed that the seller got away with it. He was a particularly a-hole type too. What you could do, if you really wanted to stick it to the guy, is call your credit card company. If they agree with you, they'll reverse the charge and PayPal will likely deduct it from him directly. : )
I see that PayPal has in fact credited the entire amount of my payment into my PayPal.com wallet as a "one-time courtesy," and thus I should feel that I have been made whole, so to speak. It's strange how the injustice still nags at me; that an arbiter actually looked at the fairly simple, straightforward facts and reached such a terrible verdict. I keep thinking back to my conversation with the PayPal CS rep yesterday evening, and how he kept defaulting back to, "Yeah, well the seller never actually stated that it was '100% mohair,' so unfortunately there's not enough here to re-open the case." "But it's 0% mohair! No mohair at all! Entirely acrylic!" I did get a follow-up email from Grailed last night asking if I was satisfied with their customer service, and I responded with a succinct paragraph touching the points I've mentioned in this thread that don't need to be re-hashed for the 20th time. Curiously I received a response from a specific person at Grailed who said she has been assigned to this case, and as she has no direct access to PayPal's records, she asked that I send her the PDF--and not a mere screen shot--of the resolution details that state specifically their basis for not deciding the case in my favor. It was worded in such a way that I got the sense she was surprised it wasn't reversed. It will be interesting to see what--if anything--Grailed does. As Eddie from Toronto mentions, I am weighing the option of contacting my credit card company. I'm apprehensive about spiraling further down the path of negative energy, but yet it pains me that this seller has essentially now been enabled and emboldened by PayPal for passing off a mis-represented item and displaying such shockingly bad behavior. Thanks once again for listening.
Ultimately it's your time and energy. But if you have both, I would stick it to this MF'er! These sorts of people jeopardize the online marketplace for all those who use it.
As a follow-up, this is one can be filed away in the "all's well that ends well" drawer. Recap: I protested to PayPal after they denied my return appeal, and they issued me a "courtesy" refund of my money. Since I was still seething about being further taunted and abused by a seller who had swindled me to begin with, I sent another email to Grailed, along with a PDF of PayPal's joyless decision as per the request of the Grailed rep who was handling the case. With no immediate reply I'd forgotten about it and moved on, until I discovered a notification of full credit for the transaction two weeks later with an apology note from Grailed. Wow. (I suppose I could have gone for the trifecta and contacted my credit card company too, but I was more interested in having the seller reprimanded than I was in getting a double-refund.) Not that I turned the $$ away after all the aggravation I went through, but I did drop the cool-looking sweater--albeit 100% acrylic and not mohair--into the donation box outside one of our local charity thrift stores for closure.
