can ebay cards be charged back after they are applied to the account? (like amazon)
Unless the account / card used to purchase the gift card was obtained fraudulently, then no - they can't be reversed once they've been applied to your account. Also, even if the account is legitimate if there's ever a case where the account got limited for fraudelent purposes all recent transactions could be reversed which could have a negative effect on your account.
Whenever someone pays me with PayPal I watch them as they do the transaction and follow a few basic steps which helps weed out the scammers a lot.
- Check their current IP to see if they are using a proxy.
- View their transaction history, if they haven't done any transactions in a while and they want to do a large one with me I deny their request. General rule of thumb is if the transaction they're going to do with you is out of character with the rest of their history then PayPal could flag it.
- Do as much research as possible with the information you have, check for scam reports etc.
Remember that there's no safe way to avoid chargebacks, you can only minimise the risk.