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Ask HN: What’s the deal with random people sending me money over PayPal?
21–30 of 71 posts
Re: Ask HN: What’s the deal with random people sending me money over PayPal?
#22Re: Ask HN: What’s the deal with random people sending me money over PayPal?
#23I've read that the scam is that they will ask you to send the money back. If you do, you'll be out of the money because the money they sent you will disappear after a while because Paypal pulls it back (probably because they sent it to you from a stolen credit card or something like that)
Thanks. There must be quite an operation behind this then to make it viable.
Input: stolen credit cards, email addresses to send to, email addresses for opening a PayPal account.
Attrition: credit card gets blocked, PayPal email gets blocked, recipient doesn’t react or doesn’t send the money back, recipient won’t fall for it twice.
5 Euro per successful attempt — 200 successes per 1000 Euro (minus the cost for acquiring credit cards and email addresses) — sounds like a low margin business.
Re: Ask HN: What’s the deal with random people sending me money over PayPal?
#24I've read that the scam is that they will ask you to send the money back. If you do, you'll be out of the money because the money they sent you will disappear after a while because Paypal pulls it back (probably because they sent it to you from a stolen credit card or something like that)
Thanks. There must be quite an operation behind this then to make it viable. Input: stolen credit cards, email addresses to send to, email addresses for opening a PayPal account. Attrition: credit card gets blocked, PayPal email gets blocked, recipient doesn’t react or doesn’t send the money back, recipient won’t fall for it twice. 5 Euro per successful attempt — 200 successes per 1000 Euro (minus the cost for acquir…
Google “PayPal duplicate money trick”. People are actively sending money from their own account to PayPal, claiming it fraud and doubling their money. They don’t care if they get locked out if they make $500-$1000. Change the input from their own money to a stolen PayPal account. It’s a payday for them (that eventually comes back to haunt them)
Re: Ask HN: What’s the deal with random people sending me money over PayPal?
#25I've read that the scam is that they will ask you to send the money back. If you do, you'll be out of the money because the money they sent you will disappear after a while because Paypal pulls it back (probably because they sent it to you from a stolen credit card or something like that)
Some of them are also not actual PayPal links they’re just phishing emails that’ll steal your credentials if you click through and try to sign in
Re: Ask HN: What’s the deal with random people sending me money over PayPal?
#26In the past this has happened to me because I have a "givenname.surname@gmail.com" email address and a relatively common name. The other people frequently misspell or forget their email address and end up with mine. I get occasional money sent via paypal but also all kinds of other email. I get a pretty clear indication of which companies don't bother with an email verification step. At one time (may still be the cas…
I'm a paranoid nerd enough that this was an actual conversation I had with my wife - should we give our kids a name combination unique / obscure enough to mitigate the risk?
What drives me insane is that 99 % of companies send "please confirm your email address"... And then have NO link to say "that's not me!". You can click for positive confirmation but you can click for negative confirmation. And they keep the account even though it's unverified email. Even though I never verified the email, I'm subscribed to ridiculous amount of Financial, retail and other services throughout Europe due to this issue (people inadvertently subscribing with my email address).
Re: Ask HN: What’s the deal with random people sending me money over PayPal?
#27I had a similar fraud that PayPal is somewhat complicit in because how how their system works: I get an official PayPal email. But it’s on behalf of a vendor who is asking for money. But they’ve carefully crafted the request to look like a receipt. As if I’ve already paid $300 for textbooks and this is my receipt. But just a few unwitting clicks and I’ll have accepted the transfer request.
I have been getting a few of these per week for the past couple of years. It’s really frustrating as the payment request comes from PayPal so won’t be flagged as spam, and there’s no way to “unsubscribe” because you get the email whether you have a PayPal account or not. I keep forwarding them to phishing@paypal.com and nothing happens. At this point, I would definitely consider PayPal to be complicit.
Re: Ask HN: What’s the deal with random people sending me money over PayPal?
#28I assume they will claim a mistake transfer if you claim and ask you to send it back to another account. It’s a small amount of probably fraudulent money, but small enough that you might just do it. And I guess the hope is enough people do to make it add up to some good recurring income. Would love to hear if there’s more to it than that.
I had the PayPal sender email and message me dozens of times begging me to return the money when it was sent in error. ($990)
“I don’t see any errors on my end, perhaps you want to take it up with customer service.”
Re: Ask HN: What’s the deal with random people sending me money over PayPal?
#29PayPal supposedly has a "refuse payment" button, but it works differently for "verified" and "unverified" accounts.
Now, if this was a bank to bank ACH transfer, the recipient could just refuse the credit. There's an error code for this situation: R10: “Customer Advises Originator is Not Known to Receiver and/or Originator is Not Authorized by Receiver to Debit Receiver’s Account”.[1] You can contact your bank and refuse an incoming ACH transaction, which will generate this.
This is different from sending money back. It says to the banking system that the transaction was rejected and did not complete. So you're not sending the unknown originator your money. You're refusing to take their money. This eliminates the possibility of a reversal from their end costing you money. It also marks the transaction as an error in the banks at both ends. This is useful, because many errors on an account are an alarm condition and will get the attention of some fraud department.
If you have to reverse a transaction, do it fast. There are time limits for the simple paths.
(A friend of mine runs a bank branch of a major bank. Much of her day is spent straightening out error situations like this.)
[1] "https://www.nacha.org/rules/differentiating-unauthorized-ret...
Re: Ask HN: What’s the deal with random people sending me money over PayPal?
#30In the past this has happened to me because I have a "givenname.surname@gmail.com" email address and a relatively common name. The other people frequently misspell or forget their email address and end up with mine. I get occasional money sent via paypal but also all kinds of other email. I get a pretty clear indication of which companies don't bother with an email verification step. At one time (may still be the cas…
I have the same issue with Facebook - someone somehow is using my email address and I frequently receive login notifications. I contacted Facebook a few times and nothing happened. Now their contact form forces me to provide my DOB to submit a request. What does my date of birth have to do with someone using my email address? I’ve been considering logging in as this person to remove my email from their account, but I’m pretty sure this is fraud.