i hope you paid through paypal with a credit card. if so, call the credit card company or go online and dispute the charge. it will be on them to go after pay

i hope you paid through paypal with a credit card. if so, call the credit card company or go online and dispute the charge. it will be on them to go after paypal to get your money back after crediting you your money back. file a police report, file a report online with the FTC, keep disputing the paypal charge. if paypal is able to contact this person to get their side of the story, they should be able to give you that information to hand over to the police. do you still have the emails/phone numbers from the craigslist contact? print out emails with full headers for the police. i'm not sure if craigslist changes any headers for mails sent through their sale-XXXX@craigslist.org addresses. might want to contact them as well to get any information you can to hand over to the police. just some general words of advice with paypal: always pay with a credit card. you get protection for just these types of cases. if you receive payment, never let it sit in your paypal account. immediately move it to a bank account. once it's there, paypal can never take it out without your authorization (if the situation were reversed and you sold something, the buyer disputed it, and paypal tried to reverse the charge on you). paypal is not a credit agency, and any claims that they're sending you to collections are just empty threats. i've gone through this once before selling a laptop on ebay. the buyer paid me with a verified paypal account that had been compromised. i shipped the laptop, a month later the legitimate paypal account owner disputed the charge, paypal tried to get the money back from me and threatened me with bogus collection attempts.