Non-Profit Getting $1-$5 Donations (FRAUDULENT?) - Please Help!

[corepaws]

Hello,

We are a small 501c3 non-profit that helps senior and special needs animals, and we have been noticing over the past month, small donations ($1 - $5) coming through. The email addresses that are sent through with the donation sometimes are not even valid. We are working with PayPal currently, but we believe that people might be testing stolen credit cards and using them as donations to test if the card is valid. We've gotten the same names/email addresses making small donations, some start at $1.34, then a week or two later donate something like $5.35.  The largest we've gotten (that we know of), so far is around $30. A few times, the fees have been reversed due to "not having sufficient funds", but other times they've gone through. I've emailed the account holders every time, and have never gotten a response from them. It is so fishy, and unfortunate if they're stealing people's identities and testing the cards with a donation to our non-profit. We are a volunteer organization thus we run off of donations.  

What can be done? Does it make sense for us to make a new account on PayPal and delete the one we currently have? Does anyone know how or why we may have been targeted? For example, are they visiting our donation page on our website, or has our donation ID been flagged somehow?

Thanks in advance if anyone has had the same issue or can think of a way to help.

Kara

[bonesbeagles]

Hi. Thanks for posting this.  I am the head of finance for a small non-profit as well and we are having the same problem.  I am going to be calling PP this morning to report this.  I noticed it started about a week ago, thought it was odd, checked all our mailing list to see if these people were on them, didn't recognize any of the names and wondered if we should reverse the charges.  

Did you do that?  Give back the money?

Thanks.

[corepaws]

Hi there,

I'm so sorry this is happening to your org too. Ours started at the end of October, we've had multiple calls with PayPal and have done a lot of research. We were sent from team to team (up the ladder) until we spoke with someone directly on their security team. They aren't very helpful in the sense of fixing this problem because PayPal allows people to donate without signing in. I think most donors would be annoyed at having to sign in with their paypal account especially if they didn't have one. But,  since it's an open donation (you can use a credit card without logging into anything), they said that these people search online for non-profits who have these types of donation portals and then test credit card information.

Yes, one of your options is to reverse the payment. If you know for sure it's a random fraudulent donation, I would certainly say your best bet is to just reverse the payment. But it won't necessarily stop them from coming. They said what we could try, is to create a "shop" button, which allows you to have a drop down of different set prices (ex: $10, $20, $30).  You would just need to create an image for your website to link the shop URL too. Right now we utilize the one time "donate" button, which allows any amount, and the monthly "subscribe" option that allows multiple donation options but those are monthly ongoing donations.

If you do the shop button as they suggest, the problem here is that this is saying your donors could only donate set amounts. Since most of these fraudulent donations come in as small transactions, setting a $10 donation as a minimum could potentially help solve this issue. We have found however, now that time has gone on... these fraudulent donations start becoming higher and higher (they start off small like $1.25, then start to increase to $7.54, etc). I've emailed each time and we get no response or a bounced email address. We are likely going to start just reversing the payments as well. 

If you reverse the payment, then no funds will be donated into your account. We've noticed that quite a few of these fraudulent donations go through... one was even as high as $35, from the same donor who started off giving $1. We've had others get reversed due to insufficient funds. 

It really is unfortunate that people do this to non profits. Please let us know if you remify this in a different way or get a better answer from Paypal.

Thanks