Hello,
I had this issue yesterday and stumbled upon this thread. While some of you may have suffered from legitimate banking fraud, my case was not so. So perhaps, my circumstance is the same as others.
I noticed a charge of $86.50 on my Chase Banking statement from web ID paypalsi77. However, the instant transfer was to a username I did not recognize (not that I recognize paypalsi77). With that being said, I reviewed my recent activity on my Paypal account and did not find any charge with that particular amount. I reported fraud to Chase and continued to do my own research. I stumbled upon someone on this forum asking a similar question to mine and someone else gave them a concise and clear answer which cleared my own confusions fears: .
https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/Disputes-and-Limitations/About-ID-PAYPALSI77/td-p/1759347
It seems that the charge appears in our Chase accounts when we use our paypal balance to partially pay a charge and debit the rest to our bank accounts. In my case, I had partially paid a $95 charge with $8.50 of my paypal balance while I charged the remaining $86.50 to my bank account. However when I looked at my recent activity on my paypal account, it only showed the charge of $95. Only upon clicking on the charge did it show the breakdown on how the charge was split between my paypal balance and bank account. The webID of paypalsi77 is some string of characters that paypal uses when transferring money from your linked bank account to a vendor/user. In my case, I was sending money to a friend so it listed their obscure USERNAME (not email, not vendor name, not real name) in my bank account so I did not recognize it. I contacted my friend and asked if they recognized this strange username and they said it was an old online name they used to use. My suspicion is that they used this name when signing up for paypal several years ago as a login and paypal still retains and displays on transactions such as this.
My suggestion to all of you is to see when the charge was posted on your bank account and compare it to the day before and day of activity on your paypal account. See if you posted any transactions on those days and click on the transactions to see if there were any split charges between your paypal balance and your bank account. Paypal often defaults to using your paypal balance first before using a secondary payment method. We sometimes click through pages so quickly when purchasing that we do not realize little things like that.
Second, if you find that it was a split transaction that caused the confusion, locate the user ID on the debit charge on your bank account line item (not paypalsi77) and ask the vendor/friend to whom you sent money if this their username or if they at least recognize it. This is not entirely necessary as you have essentially reconciled the charge to your account, but its worth it for a little more peace of mind.
I believe the idea that "this only happens to chase customers" is because the Chase banking system renders these particular paypal transactions in a very odd way in our statements that make them seem fraudulent and unrecognizable. Might be some coding issue or something (I have no idea about that stuff, just a shot in the dark).
And for those wondering, yes, I called Chase and made them aware of my mistake so that they could close their fraud case investigation.
I hope this helps some of you, if not all of you. I hope those who have suffered from genuine fraud are able to recover what they have lost.
Thank you!
