Hi,
I have no idea if the seller is a phony as in "will not deliver anything, take the money and run", but my feeling is that you are in panic with no good reason regarding the transaction itself.
First, when purchasing from China / HK vendors, you must be patient. I have many transactions that went very well, from vendors I would buy again, either on eBay or aliexpress, that would have gone sour if I started to go crazy like you did after 24 days.
Most of the time, shipping is erratic from these places, especially with free shipping. Just look at china post stats (tables displayed in many ebay auctions). They tell you that 24 days is not that uncommon.
You can recognize good (in my book) vendors by their reaction when shipping goes bad. Just this morning, I had a vendor issue me a full Paypal refund because after waiting for 30 days I still haven't received my product. The refund was his call in that case, and I gave him a very good review for that. Of course, that's with free shipping and no tracking using China Post. All smoothly. No eBay dispute or anything like that. And this is how it happens _most_ of the time, those vendors usually know what's good for them, the system is not very kind to shabby sellers. And you know what, I will probably receive the item anyway, maybe in a couple of weeks, maybe more. That happened to me before, several times. Only one in tens of purchases from eBay/AliExpress did not eventually make it to my home, and apart than this one, everytime I got a refund after running out of patience, I eventually received the parcel.
Regarding the seller answer about free shipping and no tracking, this is just standard practice for those direct from China/HK deals! And it also means that, on eBay, _they_ (the sellers) are taking the risks just so _we_ can get interesting deals. However, _we_ need to accept the China Post hickups. Again, I do not understand why you frown upon this. I mean, you are buying something real cheap, with free shipping, probably even so cheap that you know there is a 90% chance your are buying something stolen or counterfeit, but you seem to do so like if you were doing business with Element14 or Mouser, not really adapting to the rules of that very different game...
Chill out, just my 2c.