I recently fell victim to an e-commerce scam because I didn't do enough research on the site before naively making a purchase. The experience was definitely unique to me and feel it's important to convey what happened to both PayPal and its community so that action can be taken against these types of scam artists. It started when I did a Google search for an item that is pretty rare to see if any online shop was selling it. I came across one that initially seemed legit, and had the option to pay with PayPal which made it seem even more safe. So I checked out my cart, paid with PayPal, then the screen displayed "failed". Thinking I had to try again, I did. Unfortunately I was too dumb to verify that the first one didn't go through by checking my statement, because it had and I inadvertently paid twice. So I did what I think most people would have done: contact the merchant. Except there was no customer service number and the email address was fake (bounced back). When logging into PayPal, I noticed that both transactions had two completely different names and email addresses. That's when I knew this was definitely a scam. But here's the worst part. Both "merchants" sent a tracking number via PayPal email notification. The tracking number is legitimate, but not for your purchase. I don't know how they do it, but they are able to obtain tracking numbers for shipments generated around the same time as your purchase to other addresses in your city and state. This makes it VERY difficult to file a dispute with PayPal for "item not received" if there's "proof" of delivery. Except it's not proof, because there is no way to verify the actual address that the tracking number was for by someone other than the scam merchant. It seems to be a pretty sophisticated scam designed to exploit customers and PayPal's buyer protection. I was lucky and PayPal was able to resolve my dispute, but I've read posts from others who weren't so lucky. Those fake tracking numbers are the secret ingredient to successfully getting away with fraud. People need to be aware that this is an actual thing, and I wish I knew how they do it because it's also clearly mail fraud.
