Unsolicited money, sound great no? Well in this case, that's a big NO!
In November 2019 I received approximately 159 individual and unsolicited payments of $1.00 USD each to my Paypal account. I called Paypal after the email notification of the first 6 deposits and over the next 48 hours I received approx 153 additional transaction emails from Paypal. Each of the "payers" appeared to be Chinese. Many of the identical deposits were made by the same person but several people were involved. None of these "payments" were related to any selling activity by me.
Obviously, I was very concerned as I smelled a spoofing operation with these unauthorized and likely fraudulent deposits to my Paypal Account and due to concerns about identity theft or god knows what, I did not want to directly engage with these "payer" individuals. I spoke with several Paypal customer service representatives over the first weeks of this activity with the requirement each time of explaining the circumstances of this unusual fraud scheme to each new CS rep. After my patiently waiting for them to investigate this unusual account activity, several CS reps agreed to perform the refund of these unsolicited payments on my behalf and each time I was told that I need not worry as Paypal would address this strange fraud activity on my behalf. Unfortunately they did not and I spent as much as 10 hours on the phone with Paypal in the intervening months.
The Fraud begins:
After the refunds were issued, each of these payers filed payment disputes with their Bank or credit card companies against me with Paypal for a much larger amount than the original $1.00 USD payment. The disputed amounts were in Euros (varying amounts up to as much as 222.53 Euros). I'm pretty sure China is not a member of the European Union so why dispute the original amount paid in USD in Euros? In any case, now I was dealing with 159 individual disputes filed against me with Paypal for what amounted to thousands of Euros!!!! Again, I was repeatedly assured by Paypal that this strange activity would not impact my account so not to worry. OK well although uneasy about this I guess it will be handled by my helpful partner Paypal ... right? Well not so much as in January I receive two emails from Paypal indicating that in 2 of the disputed cases, Paypal actually decided the dispute in favor of the Chinese hacker for a total of $159.63. The disputed amounts were always an odd number like 88.95 Euros but always with an original payment of $1.00 USD (it should be noted that at this point, I still had 70 dispute cases being investigated by Paypal). This "chargeback" was listed as my owing PayPal the $159.63 on my account and was finally removed yesterday after a full week beyond being given assurances by Paypal it would be immediately removed. This of course required two additional 30-40 minute phone calls. During this painful process, I was not allowed to remove my funding sources from my Paypal account. I was extremely uneasy having a primary checking account linked to this crazy fraud. I finally just yesterday went to my bank and credit card issuer to have Paypal blocked from conducting any transactions on my Paypal linked accounts.
Many of the CS representatives I spoke to were sympathetic to my plight and did their best to help me but overall, my experience with Paypal during these months has been very negative. I was put on hold for up to 15-20 minutes on many occasions and having to relate the entire story to each new CS rep was frustrating and tedious. One particular CS representative (Nicole) was very rude cutting me off after 29 minutes on the phone. As a very good long term (since 2001) loyal Paypal customer, I expected much more from Paypal. This obvious Fraud situation and Paypal's inability (unwillingness?) to address it necessitating my driving it with many hours I've invested over essentially nothing has seriously shaken my belief in Paypal as a viable online payment method. All this due to unsolicited $1.00 deposits to Paypal using my apparently stolen email address which I assume is everyone's Paypal account name. I'd love to know if anyone else has had a similar experience but it certainly has exposed a vulnerability to PayPal's modus operandi that needs addressing. I can see scenarios where older more vulnerable people could not handle the responsibility of keeping up with the deluge of activity and hours on the phone with Paypal to protect themselves from this unusual type of fraud.
As the notably rude Nicole (mentioned above) said when I told her I had received 159 $1.00 deposits to my account from Chinese individuals ... "why would they do that"? ...
