PayPal dispute rules fuel fake-item chargebacks

This reads less like a mysterious zero-day and more like a nasty fraud edge case baked into the payment and dispute rules. If PayPal is slow to tighten the flow, the real bug is incentive design, not just support response time.

• –PayPal’s seller-protection docs exclude item-not-received chargebacks filed directly with card issuers, and they also leave significantly-not-as-described or counterfeit claims out of protection.
• –PayPal says that when seller protection does not apply, it debits the reversed amount and the chargeback fee from the merchant account.
• –That means merchants need stronger evidence, shipment, and identity controls than the default checkout flow assumes.
• –For integrators, the lesson is to treat dispute handling as part of product design, not just ops cleanup after a sale goes bad.