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Ask HN: What’s the deal with random people sending me money over PayPal?

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Re: Ask HN: What’s the deal with random people sending me money over PayPal?

#61

Post by hedora »

jrockway wrote: post #32
ano-ther wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the key to this scam is to send fake emails pretending to be paypal. So you email someone "hey i accidentally sent you money, can you send it back" and then you also send from your paypa1@gmai1.com email address something like "so and so sent you money on paypal, spend it right now wow this is amazing". Paypal is never actually involved until you send them money. (I think these are all Zelle scams these days.…

It is good for stuff like craigslist or splitting checks.

The following scam works with craigslist + paypal, but not zelle:

You sell me an expensive item. I paypal you the money. You check your account and see that the money landed. I walk away with the item and immediately reverse the paypal transaction.

Note that the “I sell you a stolen/broken thing that will definitely be traced to you” scam works on both paypal and zelle, since the time to discovery of the scam is long enough to pull the money out of PayPal.

I’m not sure how hard it is to set up a burner zelle account and use it for untraceable crimes. It’s apparently easy to do that with paypal.

But, to your point, yes, they’re both pretty terrible services from a consumer protection standpoint.

Re: Ask HN: What’s the deal with random people sending me money over PayPal?

#62

Post by hedora »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #52
rationalist wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like spam, I would mark it as such.

The email bothers me a little. What bothers me a lot is that there's an active account attached to my email address with dozens of companies I did not choose to engage with. It as astonishing how few companies allow you to disavow an account created with your email (practically none. I don't have an instagram myself but my email account does.) Marking their emails as spam just means I will no longer know what's being…

You could always email the company, or just validate the email, reset the password and delete the account.

The latter is risky though; some sites use email validation as proof they should attest to the real world identity of the person that owns the account. (Github is one such example).

I imagine some site does that and also does not ensure that access to the email address is enough to reset the password and 2FA setup. (Come to think of it, Github is also an example of this.)

Either way, common courtesy would dictate waiting a week or so between emailing and nuking the account.

Re: Ask HN: What’s the deal with random people sending me money over PayPal?

#64

Post by croo »

zoover2020 wrote: post #54
diordiderot wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the USA there is no such thing as transferring money immediately between banks

> In the USA there is no such thing as transferring money immediately between banks ... In Europe there I? What's your point?

Yes, there are transfers which finishes well within a minute, between banks. You can eat pizza and spit by doing a transfer yeah.

Re: Ask HN: What’s the deal with random people sending me money over PayPal?

#65

Post by 14zadz »

diordiderot wrote: post #43
ranger_danger wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the recipient transfers the money to their bank account immediately?

In the USA there is no such thing as transferring money immediately between banks

Sure there is: Zelle.

Most major banks are apart of the Zelle program and you can send your contacts funds easily and quickly. I get notification of family sending me funds pretty much immediate with confirmation of deposit within a few minutes even for a few thousand.

Re: Ask HN: What’s the deal with random people sending me money over PayPal?

#66

Post by jzebedee »

14zadz wrote: post #65
diordiderot wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the USA there is no such thing as transferring money immediately between banks

Sure there is: Zelle. Most major banks are apart of the Zelle program and you can send your contacts funds easily and quickly. I get notification of family sending me funds pretty much immediate with confirmation of deposit within a few minutes even for a few thousand.

Zelle does not actually guarantee that your payments will go on the fast path. If you send a payment after-hours or to a new recipient that scores too high on some opaque fraud metric, it will be sent like a normal ACH with a few business days of processing time.

Re: Ask HN: What’s the deal with random people sending me money over PayPal?

#67

Post by diordiderot »

zoover2020 wrote: post #54
diordiderot wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the USA there is no such thing as transferring money immediately between banks

> In the USA there is no such thing as transferring money immediately between banks ... In Europe there I? What's your point?

Yes, India and China as well.

You open your banking app, enter their bank and account number, the amount to transfer, then somewhere between seconds and a couple minutes the money arrives.

Re: Ask HN: What’s the deal with random people sending me money over PayPal?

#68

Post by 14zadz »

jzebedee wrote: post #66
14zadz wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure there is: Zelle. Most major banks are apart of the Zelle program and you can send your contacts funds easily and quickly. I get notification of family sending me funds pretty much immediate with confirmation of deposit within a few minutes even for a few thousand.

Zelle does not actually guarantee that your payments will go on the fast path. If you send a payment after-hours or to a new recipient that scores too high on some opaque fraud metric, it will be sent like a normal ACH with a few business days of processing time.

Sure there are some situations where it takes a bit longer. But I was responding to the statement saying there are NO immediate ways to send money in the US and that’s straight up not true because often enough Zelle does work, especially using it with existing contacts as I had said.

Also, Apple Pay is often immediate but has taken like 10 minutes as well so that could vary.

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