Does paypal lose money?
There are some situations where they end up just stuck, unable to come at someone who scams. At least there used to be. One reason why they now make people wait up to 3 weeks before they are able to use/access payments that have been already paid yet expect the product seller to ship without access to the money is because it was easy to list things for sale that one does not currently have and then go buy them when the item sells.
Back in the good old days I had figured out how to predict in advance when certain items at a major electronics store would end up going on sale. The store was not a national chain, so it wasn't like every person on eBay could just go to a local store and buy at the prices I was getting. That meant that I could list the item on sale on eBay and sell it, then use the retail outlet as "inventory" and just walk in and buy the item off the shelf and then ship it. It worked for me because I could list the item PRIOR to the sale, sell it and obtain the money, then go to the store and use customer money to buy the item and ship it because I had a Paypal debit card that I used in order to pay for the product. And yes, I actually turned a profit doing it that way because many times I had lower prices than my competition for the exact same model number product, so I got more sales. And ironically, this store had a price-match policy that matched even their own prices within a 30-day window so if I was off by about a week or two I could just pay the little bit extra and then when it came on sale get the money refunded through the price match.
Well eventually somebody must have ruined it by not shipping the product but just skipping with the money because Paypal changed the rules and fixed it so you had to have sold a certain minimum of that item or something close to it otherwise they would put a 21-day hold on the funds, expecting you to ship the product when the money came to your Paypal account without being able to access even the shipping fee money to ship it. If proof that the item was in the customer's hands showed up either through positive feedback or by a signature in the delivery system on shipments with a confirmation then sometimes they would release the money a little earlier, but it killed the golden goose on using store inventory to ship from.
But if you think about it, if someone were to scam and used Paypal and ran off with the money, they could just close the bank account they connected to their Paypal account after they transferred the money out of Paypal, or if they had a debit card they could just spend it or pull it out the wall at the ATM, again going to their bank and closing the account before Paypal figured out something was wrong. But now that they have a 21-day hold policy in place any problems with non-delivery are likely to show up while the money is still in their possession and control unless it happens with a trusted seller who has been selling the same type of product for a while, which is much less likely to happen.
There is a certain dollar limit that, if the scam is below that amount, are not always pursued with legal action because the costs to do so don't justify the attorneys fees and other efforts so they just let it go. But those little dollar amounts add up to a lot for a company like Paypal.
Plus, Paypal ended up under investigation because they got caught up in a money laundering situation a year or two back. Some employees at HSBC were setting up companies and bank accounts using customers' information and then depositing and moving money through accounts that the customers did not know they had. The money would get deposited into the shadow accounts from Paypal sales, and then eventually be either spent from the bank accounts or wire transferred out to other banks. It was an ugly situation because HSBC, American Express, and Paypal were all involved in the thing and so each ended up under investigation. There were several different things going on...