Just received a bill for $2,795.00 on Paypal from a company telling me i contracted to create their website and refused to do so.
I absolutely never contracted to do something like this as i have never worked with websites in my life.
My question is, if i ignore it, what will happen?
Should i contact Paypal and let them know?
What does “on paypal” mean? Do you mean you received an email invoice or payment request? Are you sure it is real, it could be a phishing scam.
Definitely contact PayPal. If it’s phishing, they’ll want to know and suspend that party’s account. If it’s an email demand and you’re absolutely sure you had no prior activity with the sender, forward it to [noparse]spoof@PayPal.com[/noparse]
Is it actually appearing on the PayPal site or did you just get an email claiming the invoice with its own link? If it’s the latter, I’d bet that it’s going to a PP clone site to try to phish your PP login info.
Definitely sounds like a phishing scam to me. I regularly receive bogus emails from companies I’ve never done business with.
But whatever you do, don’t click on or go to any link provided in an email. If you contact Paypal, do it by going directly to their own site.
Just to clear something up
This is an actual invoice on my actual account.
I was personally not aware until a few weeks ago that you could receive an invoice via PayPal, but the feature does exist. All the other party needs is your email address.
A phishing scam is likely, but so is an honest mistake–a simple typo could have meant that the invoice was sent to the wrong person. I think there’s a way to send a message via PayPal; you might want to do that just in case it was a mistake.
I guess my main question is:
If i ignore it, will Paypal eventually take the funds out of my actual bank account to cover it?
No. You still have to go through a manual process of paying the invoice (or not, as the case may be). As I said, anyone can send you an invoice if they just know your email address so it wouldn’t make sense for them to auto-debit anything.
I suspect there’s a way to just decline the invoice so it disappears forever, but I don’t have an example handy at the moment so I don’t know what the process is.
I routinely receive multiple paypal invoices from an overseas company I deal with with differing amounts of freight depending on how fast you need it, it’s like an offer to buy and if you don’t proceed they don’t even show up on my paypal account.
Did you Google the company?
My guess is that it is some kind of scammer.
I think PayPal allows a company to bill based only on e-mail address, as long as that address matches a PayPal account. So it could also be an honest mistake of billing the wrong e-mail address. You know, **TNWPsycho ** (at gmail.com) instead of TWNPsycho, etc.
Nah, on re-reading the OP, it’s probably a scam. This is the kind of claim that would normally require a lawyer and be delivered by a process server, not by a PayPal invoice. I don’t see how they could believe that anybody would actually pay it out. Report it.
Yes. I run a home-based business; while customers typically send money to my PayPal account, occasionally they ask me to invoice them via PayPal and then they pay the invoice. All that’s required is the customer’s email address, which is the unique identifier for that particular PayPal account.
A customer may choose not to pay the invoice. I don’t know what recourse a business may have with PayPal to enforce payment, but I suspect very little, since it’s trivially easy to send anyone an invoice for anything.
This is nonsense.
What? It’s one thing to send a normal bill through PayPal for goods or services. But according to the OP, this is a company that claims it has already paid TNWPsycho for some work and that the work has not been done, so they say they want their money back from TNWPsycho. This is not something I would expect to occur through a simple e-mail + PayPal process. I may be pushing it a bit with the process server, but there should at least be some form of legal notification beforehand.
I misread it initially, too. Some ambiguity around the meaning of “contracted” as a verb.
I assume it means “TNWPsycho entered into a contract in which he was obligated to produce a website for a client, and he did not deliver, despite being at least partially paid in advance” (in which case this is a claim to recover advanced funds) vs. “TNWPsycho entered into a contract in which some other company was obligated to produce a website which he would then pay for” (in which case it’s just a regular invoice).
A)It sounds like they’re claiming he reneged on a contracted and as part of breaking that contract, he owes some sum of money. It’s a lot easier to say ‘hey, pay us’ then to sue him for it.
B)It’s a common scam to send random invoices to a ton of companies and see how many of them pay you for them. I got one a few years ago for something or other. I tried to contact the company that sent it to me and that’s how I found out it was a scam (I thought they just sent it to my fax by mistake). Turns out they just send it out randomly and hope it just ends up in the Accounts Payable department of business that don’t check what it’s for and pay it.
Anyways, if I got this invoice, I might do some googling of who it’s from, but in the end I’m sure I’d just ignore it.
Legal notification doesn’t come beforehand. It’s what you do when non-legal remedies don’t work. In other words, if somebody owes you money, you ask them to pay you. If they refuse, then you hire a lawyer, file a complaint and serve it. Even that’s not strictly accurate because any sensible lawyer would first say, “hey, you refused to pay this before and now I am representing payee. Pay them.” That is especially true in the small claims context, because it will cost you a minimum of twice as much in legal fees to recover $3k.
Just to make absolutely, positively sure: Are you logging into your PayPal account on the legitimate PP server and seeing this transaction?
If you clicked on ANY link in the original email, ten different kinds of bad things could have happened that will have you permanently seeing a redirected (bogus) server. They would also have your PP login information to back up/extend/compound the problems. Once this kind of scam hooks you, you can be REALLY hooked.
I would use a completely clean computer - a friend’s, on their ISP, or a library terminal - to carefully log in directly to PP and see what you see there.