Same EXACT thing happened to me, ordered my kit from kit and made payments to him. He was telling me my kit was nearing completion every week for about 7 months. I finally got concerned come to find out he had gotten evicted from his shop, took all my money (4,600) dollars and disappeared. What the hell do I do.
Unfortunately, the charge back rules have changed a lot lately. How did you pay? If you used a card, the only chargeback option you have is probably related to fraud, aka you never gave him permission to charge you. Once you tell them its a quality of service or fulfillment issue, meaning you acknowledge participating in the transaction in any way, those are now different chargeback categories(reason codes) and they do not have the same windows for chargebacks. I think they've shrunk it down from a year to six months and now to just 90 days for anything that isn't fraud. And by fraud, they mean, 'you don't know who youwish is, why is this charge appearing'. And frankly, I wouldn't be afraid to try that angle. If I extrapolated out his business skills to his book keeping skills, chances are, he won't even reply to the chargeback and you'll win by default.
Unlike a regular paypal to paypal dispute, if he's using paypal to accept credit cards, paypal has the card association processing rules to adhere to, they essentially have a big aggregator MID(merchant ID) where they can issue out other processing accounts to other businesses. This MID has direct ties to the card processing network of Visa, MC or(less likely) it may be through another big platform like FirstData etc. My point is, paypal has to answer to the chargeback rules set forth by the card network you used.
If his business bank account is out of money, his merchant will continue to bill him and hold his personal guarantor liable for the charges. Paypal does essentially the same thing but they aid (and interfere) in the process more than a traditional merchant services provider.
Anyway, hope you get it resolved, but people on the forums have called out several companies for running shams, but the people on Facebook know everything and will stand by folks because they are their favorite youtuber. 99% of what a lot of people know is from what they just read last week and they have only a single source of information.
When you have to start making excuses for other people's excuses to make any sense, then you know there is something wrong.