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If, like me, you paid with PayPal, you'll automatically be routed to the PayPal resolution centre, which provides a similarly structured environment for the buyer and seller to communicate. You get 20 days to exchange messages and negotiate a favourable outcome. If that doesn't happen, you can choose to escalate the dispute to a PayPal claim.

At this stage PayPal takes over. It reviews the communications so far, asks for a proof of purchase or other evidence if necessary and decides on a suitable outcome. In my dispute, the seller managed one final promise to provide a refund and then promptly disappeared, so I entered a claim. PayPal emailed nine days later with a resolution in my favour. So I was about to get my money back, right? Wrong.

The PayPal Buyer Protection service offers up to £500 reimbursement for non-delivered goods, or goods that vary significantly from the seller's description. Buyers and sellers in some countries are excluded from this, so read the terms and conditions carefully. However, to qualify for this level of protection, the seller must have a 98 per cent positive feedback rating and at least 50 feedback points. Mine didn't. Consequently, PayPal credited me with just £150, promising to make its 'best efforts' to recover the rest of my money. However, when I rang PayPal's customer helpline, I was told that these efforts would involve emailing the seller occasionally and reminding him of the debt.

PayPal won't comment on its procedure or reveal the

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details of its debt collection policies because the information could be of use to scammers. So it's possible that PayPal was doing something but couldn't tell me. I haven't heard anything since, so I assume it had no luck.

PayPal did freeze the seller's account. This means that if the seller were to provide a refund, they would have to send a cheque to the company's headquarters and then contact it again to authorise the transfer to my account.

I fought the law

Next, I visited the website of my local police force and reported the incident through an internet crime form. Most forces provide information about eBay fraud on their sites and have officers trained and experienced in such cases. You can also phone your local station or pop in and ask to report the incident.

What happens next depends on the exact nature of your complaint, and the policies and resources of your local police authority. In my case, a couple of days after filling in the online form I was called back and asked for more details of the transaction. A day later I received another call, this time from a fraud squad detective at my local station. He apologetically explained that as an isolated incident, the situation didn't really merit a criminal investigation - it was a civil matter and would need to be pursued through the county court as a small claim.

Clive Freedman, a legal expert from the Society for Computers and Law, clarifies the situation. "It is a criminal offence for a person to put an item up for sale on eBay and then dishonestly to decide to keep the payment without delivering the goods. But where the seller is a private individual who only sells on eBay very occasionally, there could be all sorts of reasons why the seller may have failed to deliver the goods or repay the price. Even if the reasons given are not true, they could sound plausible enough for the seller to be given the benefit of the doubt in a criminal court. In the circumstances it would be common for the case not to look strong enough for the authorities to want to prosecute."