In class we briefly discussed online identity theft and fraud, and money scams. Recenetly one of the new ways that people are falling victims to these schemes are scams through PayPal. PayPal prides itself on being the safest way for people to shop online, but scammers have found ways to manipulate the system and make a pretty penny off of it.
One way people are being scammed is when they placing expensive merchandise for sale on a website, like craigslist, and the scammer claims to only be able to pay through PayPal. Hoping that you do not have an account with PayPal they send an email with a link for you to make an account, but the link is actually a phishing site used to steal your personal information. Another thing they may do is send more than you asked for your merchandise and then ask you to send the extra money back through a wiring service, but it’s all a ruse and leaves you out the entire amount on PayPal plus the “extra” money that you send back to them. And if you shipped the merchandise to them before realizing what happened you are out of that as well.
The last and most common way people are being scammed out of money on PayPal is when the scammer sends you real money and you ship the merchandise to them, except the credit card used on the PayPal account or the PayPal account itself is not theirs. This actually happened to my boyfriend and I. Occasionally we stream ourselves playing video games on twitch.tv and a common way people will show streamers support is to send the streamers donations via PayPal. Over the course of about three months one of our followers had send us a total of around four hundred dollars. We were ecstatic and couldn’t believe the support he was showing us especially since we were going through a hard time moneywise. About two months later we got a message from a fellow friend, who was also a streamer on twitch, telling us to check our PayPal balance. It turns out this kid had made over five thousand dollars worth of donations to about six different streamers and all of them were being disputed by the credit card company. He had apparently stolen his mother’s credit card and mad a PayPal account with it to make all the donations. PayPal has certain terms and conditions about disputes by credit card companies, basically saying that there is nothing they can do for you and you have to pay back the balance yourself even though you are a victim in the scam. PayPal even has a disclaimer saying “PayPal reserves the right not to dispute a chargeback even if the seller has provided some evidence, particularly if PayPal believes the dispute is not likely to be successful.” Meaning they don’t care who pays them their money as long as it gets paid back.
While PayPal claims to be the safest way to shop and sell online make you take every precaution to protect yourself from being a victim of a PayPal scam.
http://patch.com/california/poway/when-selling-stuff-watch-out-pay-pal-scams-0
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