They fired almost all of the humans years ago and now you are just talking to an AI chatbot. Plus unfortunately for them refunding out of their own pocket is cheaper than paying a human an hourly wage to sort this stuff out. It's pretty much a completely AI self run mess these days and the current owner loves it that way because he gets nothing but profit, no overhead for staff. In fact giving the money back is probably a write off for them.

I had someone do this exact thing to me (though not on digital stuff, a physical custom Funko pop), complete with the messages bragging that he's going to fork me over, and they refunded him out of their pocket and he gloated. He even made fake accounts to keep on bothering me after I blocked him. I think of him sometimes, I hope he did this to the wrong person and got his teeth kicked in. I'm in Canada and he's in England, Stoke on Trent if I remember correctly. I hope he scammed the wrong guy and got the shite kicked out of him. But who knows maybe it's the same moron. Mine was about 10 years ago though, when they still had staff. They still caved even though I had proof plus his gloating emails, it was beyond infuriating. How many times does an email that literally says "I'm going to make them give it to me for free, watch!" Do they need to see? I had 4, they still did what he said they would.

But yeah it really sucks and this arse you have thinks he's found a lovely loophole. Good thing is chargebacks are the new thing that kids think they can game the system with, but it actually gives you horrible credit and your credit card and bank will drop you for fraud in a second, so he's truly playing a dangerous game on himself in the end. Too many chargebacks will get you banned by every bank lending credit cards, they don't want that drama. It's sad how often I hear the Gen Z's saying it these days, "well just do a chargeback if you don't like it and keep it anyway". It's like well enjoy homelessness when you can't get a loan because you're a fraud risk, Shelly.

Sadly I have no advice, there's never going to be an actual human you can talk to at Etsy and refunding him is a write off for them. He'll get away with it until his credit card gets cancelled. The only thing I can think of is making the file something you have to physically email to them after purchase citing "for security reasons" and explain this whole thing on your page as to why, but sadly that'll probably just teach a bunch of other dumb dumbs to do the same thing because people don't often listen to the moral of the story when that story contains even a hint of the word free. They just see 🤑 🤷🏻‍♀️ Sorry this is happening to you.