PayPal assignging wrong username to phone contacts

[JohnSmith7]

Hi everyone, 

I've had a recent issue with a PayPal transaction that I was wondering if anyone had any experience with.  What happened is: 

A friend of mine has me listed in her contacts as John Doe.  When she linked her phone contacts to her PayPal account, PayPal showed my contact and listed  JohnDoe as the PayPal username.  She did not manually enter this username, but PayPal instead automatically assigned this username when she linked her phone contacts to her PayPal account.  However, my actual username iis JohnDoe at Gmail.com. 

Recently this friend attempted to send me $1400 by selecting my contact in the Paypal app and sending the money as Friends and Family.  This money went to the incorrect account who is now not responding or returning the money.  PayPal has told us that they cannot reimburse this amount since it was sent as friends and family.  

I feel that PayPal should bear some responsibility in the fact that when my friend linked her phone contacts, PayPal suggested the wrong username.  I've confirmed with PayPal that there is only one account assigned to my phone number, so I'm not sure how this would have happened in the first place.  Second, my actual name/account is a much less common name than John Doe so it seems maybe an imposter account was created.  It seems ridiculous to me that PayPal wouldn't reimburse this amount and I'm wondering what the point of linking phone contacts with PayPal would be if you can't reliably trust th4e username that PayPal says is assigned to your phone number.  

Has anyone been through a similar situation and had success with PayPal customer support fixing the situation?  if PayPal still refuses to fix the situation, are there any other remedies such as my friend contacting her bank that would resolve this? 

Thank you everyone

[sharpiemarker]

@JohnSmith7 

A dispute through sender’s bank would be the only recourse. Some people do view suddenly receiving money in their account as a scam so they don’t do anything. A scammer situation is money is sent from stolen account or funding source and then asks recipient to send it back and if recipient did not know any better to refund from within the transaction and send the money back in a separate transaction, then they get hit with a chargeback or PayPal dispute after they done returned the money.

It’s best to always double check all payment information including recipient information before finalizing transaction. I prefer to use the recipient’s email address rather than these shortened or extrapolated names @usernames and account holder names where’s it can be difficult to who’s who or don’t also let you see the email address, tbh. Nothing doin’. 

I have a duplicate contact in my list and I can’t tell what email addresses it is and you can’t remove or delete from one’s contact list. They don’t let you remove nothing these days.