I swore off PayPal for ~5 years for something similar. I was part of a group buy of something, and PayPal got overzealous in recognizing fraud. They locked the target account for months, preventing the buy from completing. But they also decided that they couldn’t refund the money either. In the end it took a heroic effort by the guy doing the buy. TBH, I think he had fronted the money for the buy, and so had to do the work to recover it.
FWIW he probably did eventually get the money, paypal has a policy that they'll release your money in a maximum of 180 days from when they freeze it. But it's very likely he had to wait the full 180 days to withdraw it.
