Because I am a persistant bugger and don't take abuse from anyone, I have wasted the last year trying to get my money back from some scumbag on Ebay by the name of "prostoragers". This scammer sold me a faulty Xbox hard drive which was not suitable for use with xboxes (xbox keeps rejecting it, and you lose all your data), now this was not my xbox, it was for my kids xbox,  and I had 2 small boys in floods of tears over this because they had lost all the work they had done on minecraft and various other games they had almost completed, and this happenned TWICE.
Prostoragers eventually admitted the drive had this problem it was not fit for purpose even though this info was not on the auction. He/She then asked me to return it for a refund, which I did, and then refused to refunnd me and has ignored me ever since.

It turned out the seller "prostoragers" was based in China, despite having a UK distribution address, so there was nothing I could do to chase them as they hide behind a UK po box, so I have spent most that time harrassing ebay to take some action, and being ignored by them also. Other than the occasional useless canned response, no-one at ebay even bothered to take any notice at all of my emails, so they are obviously quite happy for their sellers to rip people off, even though I had all the discussion in my ebay inbox as evidence, all I could get from them was "you are outside the 45 day buyer protection".

I finally had a enough and was about to give up, and decided I would one last bitch about ebay on twitter and see if they took notice, as this does seem to work well with most companies, and suddenly I got a response from them asking me to email details to [email protected].

I sent them the details of the scam, and within 1 week, I have been contacted by the seller and got a full refund, so presumably ebay must have given them some shit and told them to refund me or else.
I asked prostoragers what about the compensation for my time over the last year, unsurprisingly I got no reply.

What have I learned from this expereince ?

• before you buy anyhting on ebay, check that the seller is based in the UK and has a proper verifyable UK address
• If you have any inkling of an issue, open a dispute with ebay right away just in case so that you are inside their 45 day buyer protection scheme.
• Once you are outside these 45 days, it seems ebay wont even bother to read your emails, they will just give you useless canned responses.
  Not that I know if they will do any better if you are within the 45 days, I suspect it might be just as painful.
• do a bitching session on twitter, make sure you cc @ebay, this seems to get their attention.
• make sure you keep a copy of all communications with the seller. Your ebay inbox or auction history doesn't last forever, so in the event that your dispute drags on for months, you should take a copy of everything outside of ebay, including screenshots of your ebay account, and auctions.

So if you take nothng else from this, I hope you at least might remember the name "PROSTORAGERS" and remember to never buy anything from them on ebay.