PayPal accused of 'making' dissatisfied buyer smash antique violin
Alex Needham
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 4 January 2012 17.03 GMT

The internet service PayPal has come under fire for allegedly forcing a user of the service to destroy an antique French violin in order to get a refund, due to a dispute over its authenticity. The blog Regretsy, which mainly features strange handmade artifacts culled from around the web, posted an email from a user identified only as Erica. In the email, which has gone viral, Erica claims to have sold a pre-second-world-war violin on eBay to a buyer in Canada for $2,500 (£1,600). Though the violin was authenticated by "a top luthier" prior to its sale, on receiving it the buyer disputed its provenance.

“Rather than have the violin returned to me, PayPal made the buyer DESTROY the violin in order to get his money back. They somehow deemed the violin as 'counterfeit' even though there is no such thing in the violin world.” “The buyer was proud of himself, so he sent me a picture of the destroyed violin … it is beyond me why PayPal simply didn't have the violin returned to me.” The website features a picture of a smashed violin bearing the Maurice Bourguignon label. Paypal's terms of service includes a clause saying that in order to resolve a payment dispute, “PayPal may … require you to destroy the item and to provide evidence of its destruction”.

A spokesperson for PayPal said: "While we cannot talk about this particular case due to PayPal's privacy policy, we carefully review each case, and in general we may ask a buyer to destroy counterfeit goods if they supply signed evidence from a knowledgeable third party that the goods are indeed counterfeit. The reason why we reserve the option to ask the buyer to destroy the goods is that in many countries, including the US, it is a criminal offence to mail counterfeit goods back to a seller."

Andrew Hooker, an antique violin dealer and former auctioneer at Sotheby's, said that "only an imbecile" would buy a precious instrument without playing it first. "The whole point of a violin is how it sounds to the player. At Sotheby's I knew of Stradivariuses that were pronounced to be almost unplayable by well-known virtuosi, only for a different one to come in and buy it. The things are absolutely individual to the buyers and anyone who doesn't understand that really is naive." He added that difficulties in eBay sales often arise when either the buyer or seller is more knowledgeable than the other party. "I was involved in a case recently where the seller was selling a fake deliberately. The buyer did ultimately get their money back but it took the best part of two years. "I sympathize with the wronged party but a fool and his money are easily parted."

(source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/04/paypal-buyer-destroys-violin)

In Text, paraphrases that best state the opinions expressed by the seller, by the spokesperson for PayPal and by Andrew Hooker are, respectively, the following: