Received unexpected/unauthorized payments to PP acct -- need advice

[Barbara238]

I have received two separate $40 payments to my PayPal account, from a sender I do not know and have had no transaction with.  I have not sold anything on eBay/etc. in ages. 

The other party has disputed the transactions.  I want to also.

The automated options on PayPal website do not allow me to dispute them, only to explain why they're valid, or to reimburse the guy.

The disputes pages tell me that my PP balance is now negative $80, and I can't use my PP account for a legitimate transaction unless I cough up $80 to bring my PP balance to zero.

Also, if I don't resolve these transactions within a set amount of time, the other party gets DOUBLE the amount in question from me...

IS THIS A NEW SCAM???

The PP website/communication options gave me no relief.

Please offer me advice.

[beckis13]

Same thing JUST happened to me.  Logged on this AM and found that at 1 am Eastern this morning I had 2 $40 deposits and one $49.99 fradulent payment to Microsoft,( apparently it was set up as recurring contract payment) within minutes of each other.  Was the person you received payments from initials K I H?  I immeadately filed a claim online for the fradulent payment to "Microsoft" (I'm doubtful this is the real one) but it wouldn't let me file a claim on the payments, so I called Customer Service to file a report on those.  When I filed the complaint for the payment to "microsoft" I included inthe notes that the payments I received were fraudulent too, so at least they have a record that way also.   

[Barbara238]

The business name (fictitious) was "R U Ready"

The email of the "buyer" (fictitious) was "topher_km@..."

The web address the "buyer" gave was "www.inwiththenew.com" (fictitious).  Does not exist; auto redirect takes user to a completely different website; neither have anything to do with "R U Ready".

What identifying information did your transactions include?

[PayPal_Andy]

Barbara238- I'm sorry to hear that this has happened to you.  Because in this case you're the 'seller' (since you're receiving the money), you can't dispute those transactions.  But the fact that you're now negative means that somewhere that money was used (otherwise you'd be back to zero), so I would check through and see if there's any outgoing transactions like beckis13 had.  If you have those, then you can absolutely file them as unauthorized.  If you don't find any unauthorized outgoing payments, then that money must've been used somewhere.

You're both (if you haven't already) going to want to change your password and probably security questions and maybe run a system scan on your computer to make sure you haven't picked up any viruses.  And you can absolutely call PayPal and we'll get investigations going.  I know it's tough dealing with things like this, but we'll get it sorted out!

Andy