I'm sorry this happened. These people take advantage of people like you (willing to help a friend). It's a common scam, and it causes lots of confusion and frustration. For future reference, you simply should not ever send money to people or accept money for people, etc. through social asks. Never log in to your PayPal account from links given in social channels or emails, etc. This sort of standard practice online will help you avoid this in the future. The problem at this point is that the funds used to submit that payment were most likely through a stolen credit card. The refund that PayPal provided went back to this person. Not the fraudster. As such, you cannot simply ask PayPal to leave the cash with you and not refund it. Credit card companies protect their users. When cash is stolen through a card, the card company will give that cash back to the buyer, and the liability then falls to the person who received those funds to cover it. So there's a big chain of fraud here, and it affects everybody. - Somebody stole a credit card number from somebody else. - They then created a fake Facebook account to run this scam through. - They found you, and send you a PayPal payment using the stolen credit card. - You accepted those funds. (That makes YOU responsible for those funds, and making sure the buyer was legit and happy with the transaction.) - The actual card owner discovered the fraudulent transaction and filed a dispute with their card issuing bank. - The card issuing bank immediately refunds the card holder their money and pulls this money back from PayPal to cover it. - PayPal then has to come to you for it. So again, now PayPal is the one covering the fraud until you pay it back, which is why payment holds are often introduced. Had that happened, you'd have been complaining that they're holding your money and you can't send it to your friend...but then when you learned it was fraud you would have been thankful. It's an extremely sticky situation, and unfortunately all you can really do at this point is learn from it. I hope it wasn't a large transaction..??
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