Suspicious donations

[richards1052]

I accept Paypal donations on behalf of a blog I own.  In the past two weeks, I've received a series of $1 donations from individuals whose names are unfamiliar.  I have never received a donation in this amount before via Paypal.  So far I've received 5 of these donations, each supposedly from different individuals.  The first person who made such a donation then disputed the donation.  Because the matter is in dispute, I could not refund the funds to the donor.  I had to call Paypal to notify them that I did not solicit the donation, did not bill the person for the donation, & know nothing about what happened.  Paypal told me to e mail the person saying that if they removed the dispute I could then refund the money.  I did so, but the matter remains in dispute.  I wonder whether the individual's e mail address is even real.

Since several others of these donations happened immediately afterward, this is starting to look like a pattern.  Should I refund the money of all the donors before they can claim a dispute?  Anyone else know why this may be going on?  Does someone want to **bleep** up my status with Paypal so I can no longer accept donations?

[TT441]

This is happening to me too.  Probably have 50 in the last week of $1 donations.  Now they are coming back and opening disputes for each one.  I attempted to refund the 1st one and it refunded over $20 because they must be claiming more so that they get more money back.  So if I refunded all of the $1 donations I would be out $1000!  So apparently they have advanced the scam by claiming more than what they donated.  Paypal has been no help.  Told me to block the user.  I said how would I do that when there are 50 of them and they are filing claims on all 50?!

[vicat]

I've had 3 today alone, and immediately responded to find address does not exist. Frustrating!

[anothernothappy]

Our small non-profit has this problem as well. 

We are not using a form on our website in which to add a captcha to. We are using a PayPal button on our site which directs to a form?, on a PayPal domain, where the fraudulent charge is occurring. Perhaps PayPal could implement the reCAPTCHA, similar to the one below for submitting a comment, or perhaps a "donations under $5 cannot be refunded" policy.

We do need this taken care of soon so we are looking into all of our options.

[haiiah]

Excellent idea but Paypal will likely do nothing, to protect yourself for now you have to get have website only donations with a captcha even then you might get some bad guys, good luck and until you get it resolved just keep refunding the scam ones, its all we can do AS PAYPAL DOES NOT LISTEN OR APPARENTLY CARE 

[ivordurham]

Unfortunately a reCAPTCHA won't help. We've done that and it didn't slow down these suspicious donations. PayPal cannot refuse to refund the funds when the real owner of the credit card disputes the transaction with their financial institution. So the crooks make the charge and the owner disputes it then PayPal refunds it. (I've spent far too many hours on this problem and it just makes me see red.)

What might help would be to demand the CVV code for tiny (or otherwise suspicious) donations. I can only hope the crooks probably wouldn't have that. It might help if the threshold amount for demanding the CVV could be set in the business profile.

[KittyKD]

We’ve been experiencing the same issue. What these people are doing is testing stolen credit cards with the small dollar amounts. Then, when those test out, they may try to issue an e-check for a much larger amount. Wait a few days, however, and you’ll find they cancel the transaction. Again, the point is to test to see how much money is on the stolen card. There is an option in profile settings in your account where you can select the option to deny all e-check donations or payments. That’s what we did and, for awhile, these fraudulent donations stopped. We also refunded all the small donations as soon as they came in. We’re US based and most donations were US currency with only a tiny fraction of them in Euros. Anyway, after a hiatus of about a month, they started up again. And then we got some random large donations[Removed. Phone #s not permitted] etc. They came through as a regular money transfer transaction and not as an e-check. I actually recognized a few of the names who had sent in $1+ donations two months prior when they’d been testing the cards initially. The person who sent in the donation for $997.34 actually wrote us at our email address and commended us on our work and that they want to support us but ran into a difficult situation and need $800 of the amount they donated sent back to them but that we could keep $197.34. Surprise, surprise! Like I didn’t see that one coming. I refunded all of it with a note that I was aware this was a scam and we don’t want any of their stolen money. Basically, they’re using stolen credit cards and then claim they made the donation in error or sent more than they meant to and request it be sent back. The money - originally sent from a stolen credit card - when sent back goes into their PayPal account, not back on the card. And voila! Instant cash for them to collect and use. They’re using charities to help them with their theft of other people’s money. I have called PayPal to report the suspicious activity but there’s really nothing they can or will do other than advise you refund the money. I don’t have time for these stupid scammy games but I do hate being party to these thieves and what amounts to robbery of innocent people. Yet there’s really nothing that can be done to stop this. You’re basically forced to collude. It sucks.

[rishfilet]

Is there any update on this? It has been almost a year and these issues are still happening.

I work with an NGO that is at negative bank balance and COVID putting us further in the red. Now what is happening to us is that there are these fraudulent donations coming in that are being refunded and the org is forced to pay funds that we do not have further putting is in red. This is absolutely unacceptable by Paypal as there is little to no security for this issue and to protect the vulnerable organisations that are receiving the donations. Doing something simple as asking the account owner if they wish to accept the donation could be done since the emails are clearly spam emails since anyone can see that they are not real when you compare them to the names being used.

As a software engineer and infosec amateur i am working on coming up with a solution to fix this. If anyone would like to join the fight with me (as clearly big corp paypal doesn't seem to want to put the effort here), then please reply and let's find a way to help each other.

[KittyKD]

We continue to experience the small "test" donations of $3.00 and under. It's aways the same "person" but we suspect they're just using one account now to do this rather than several as we experienced back in 2018 and 2019. We've stopped refunding these small amounts of money back to the "donor" and just let them stand. They have not, however, sent any large "donations" over the past year so we haven't had to worry about the people committing this method of fraud suddenly asking for their money back or filing a claim where they request a return. As far as we are aware, PayPal still hasn't done anything to rectify this issue because, even as of last week (October 2020), it's still happening. 

One of the things we have done is remove the PayPal donation button from our website and stated why. Since doing this, the fraudulent activity has diminished significantly. We've also been routing donors to Venmo where and when we can.

[vicat]

What do we do to stop it messing up our accounts?