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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?

#31

Post by xp84 »

ano-ther wrote: post #23
Aulig wrote: post #8

I'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…

When your time is cheap, making a few bucks a day scamming probably beats working all day carrying bricks or working in a diamond mine, or whatever.

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

#32

Post by jrockway »

ano-ther wrote: post #23
Aulig wrote: post #8

I'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…

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. I don't really know what Zelle is, but it seems like all the banks got together and were like "how can we really screw over our customers?" and this is what they came up with. You really can't reverse transactions? Why would I use a bank for that when I can easily lose all my money to scams with Bitcoin? It's so crazy to me.)

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

#33

Post by tetrep »

chasil wrote: post #13

Tangential story... I had a Northwest Airlines VISA card in the early 2000s. One day, I noticed a USD $6,000 deposit. I sent a message to customer service that something was wrong. The next day, I noticed a $5,800 withdrawal. At this point, I called customer service. They removed the deposit right away, but I had to engage repeatedly to get the withdrawal off my statement. I think this involved some kind of written s…

I don't have any experience with this, but maybe they found a store or something that they could use to get a refund to a specific card and they used your stolen debit card info to get the refund and then proceed to spend it all hopefully before the card holder notices.

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

#34

Post by xp84 »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #26
wyldfire wrote: post #7

In 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 acco…

Personally I think a non-unique name is best for security concerns, all things considered. You don’t want one ex-boyfriend or whatever to be able to find every last trace of your online existence, trivially, for the rest of your life, just by knowing your name. It is better that it’s going to be mixed in with tons of chaff from all the other Greg Jacksons or Catherine Williams (or whatever the applicable culture’s normal names are).

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

#35

Post by millzlane »

shortcake27 wrote: post #27
Waterluvian wrote: post #20

I 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.

Data is everything in 2023. Paypal absolutely knows exactly how much money they are getting from these types of emails. It shouldn't be much work to find that in their sent folder.

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

#36

Post by ranger_danger »

Animats wrote: post #29

PayPal 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 re…

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

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

#37

Post by zimpenfish »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #26
wyldfire wrote: post #7

In 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 acco…

> And then have NO link to say "that's not me!"

I add those destination email addresses to the system filter as a hard reject. I assume the other end will get the message eventually.

Even having a "it's not me" link doesn't always help if they use a different email each time - for a while, I was getting 3-5 Russian Instagram "confirm your email"s a week and the "it's not me" made no visible difference.

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

#38

Post by kmoser »

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.…

With great power comes great responsibility. Non-reversible transactions are dangerous in the sense that you can't reverse them, but that's the case with cash (not to mention handing over physical goods). But it cuts both ways: it means if somebody pays you what they owe you, there's no way for them to claw it back later.

tl;dr Want a permanent transaction? Use cash or Zelle. Want the ability to reverse a transaction or dispute a charge? Use a check or credit card.

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

#39

Post by postalrat »

chasil wrote: post #13

Tangential story... I had a Northwest Airlines VISA card in the early 2000s. One day, I noticed a USD $6,000 deposit. I sent a message to customer service that something was wrong. The next day, I noticed a $5,800 withdrawal. At this point, I called customer service. They removed the deposit right away, but I had to engage repeatedly to get the withdrawal off my statement. I think this involved some kind of written s…

In the case of the television id guess someone used your card number to place an order and the transaction got flagged.

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

#40

Post by Eduard »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #26
wyldfire wrote: post #7

In 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 acco…

Kinda weird, considering the whole idea of double opt-in is to only start spamming you once you actively consent via e-mail action
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