On hold ship now-- what does this mean?

Ebay’s policy of holding payments for transaction or items considered high risk

What are high risk items? Consumer electronics is one. Cellphones, ipods, mp3players, digicam, gaming console etc

This is the scenario, my friend sold an ipod nano on ebay, received the funds and funds were placed on hold shortly after the payment was receveid. He’s upset and confused. Natural reaction. So he wrote to paypal and asked why hes payment got held. He got a reply with a fAmiliar header that says “ my name is so and so and I hope all is well with you. I understand that oyu are concerned about the funds tha were placed on hold, I will help you with this, sir. The next pharagraph would be about the representative shoving eBay and paypal’s policy in your face again. To cut it short, the rep only meant that its for both parties security, but because of this, you don’t have the money to ship the goddamn item, then the rep will tell you that for the mean time, use your own money to ship the item while the funds are being held. What the heck.
This is frustrating. What if you rely on that money to pay for your rent? And the funds will be held for a couple of days or weeks. Ok so my friend shipped the item with his own money and uploaded the shippinginformation, and thought that that’s all hes gotta do to get his funds. But lo and behold, the funds are not released, he needed to call cust svc to have the funds released, so he was put on hold forever by the representative, only to find out that the funds cannot be released yet, the rep said that he needs to wait for 3 days after paypal proved that he posted. What the hell?
But the rep told him that the funds can also be released if his buyer leaves him positive feedback or if it has been 21 days without any dispute. 21 days? 21 freaking days? Wow. If you need that money to put food on the table youd be dead by then.