I created an account on an online store and to remain anonymous I put my address as that of the White House. Today as an experiment I put an item on my cart and did everything one would to actually buy something until you had to connect to a PayPal account. Yet on the log it shows that I “bought” the item even though I didn’t confirm it to PayPal so did I really buy it and is the President going to receive that item in his mail box?
It shouldn’t happen but it’s possible. Just as it’s possible that if a package is delivered to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, you will probably receive a visit shortly thereafter from several of the resident’s subordinates. FWIW, they don’t play oopsies with anyone.
nm
Depends on how the store was coded to interact with PayPal. When you sell online using PayPal, and you actually use the forms on PayPal’s site (instead of doing it all on your site and sending info silently to PayPal) then you can’t collect any money without the PayPal transaction being completed.
So if you didn’t complete the PayPal transaction then you won’t be charged. The person who coded the site did a poor job of coding and didn’t wait for an OK from PayPal before telling the user that their order was complete.
If the seller relies on notifications from PayPal that there was a transaction, then there will be nothing to notify about. If the seller has something programmed in to the site that assumes a purchase has been completed without relying on some sort of transaction details from PayPal, then they might actually send something out to someone.
But if they’re stupid enough to leave such a big programming error in their site, then that’s too bad that they just let themselves get scammed. You didn’t actually scam them, their application did.
Anyway there are LOTS of variables in play here and 99% chance you didn’t buy anything but there is indeed a tiny chance a package would go out.
Alright thank you.
Depending on the site, it might not even be coding error - it may be that the normal course of action here is for a customer service representative to contact you to complete payment (i.e. they may have deliberately accepted your order, so as to retain your custom - but will not send anything until payment happens).
My guess… Odds are the transaction is stuck in limbo, halfway between bought and not. Shipping won’t happen until there is a valid payment, but it’s not going to abandon the transaction unless you tell it to. Maybe this is deliberate coding - you don’t have to go back and find all 20 items you put in your cart just because the browser timed out or your modem dropped the line (ah, the good old days!) while you ran off to find your credit card. The system did not have a code for “almost bought” or “being bought” so once you commit to “i’ve bought” and go to the pay process, it flags it as “bought”… but no shipping until the payment in confirmed.
Some cautions:
Not sure what the laws are for computer fraud etc. All those terms of service that we ignore and just click on the “Yeah, yeah, I’ve read it” button - you may be committing computer fraud. If you obviously have no intention of pretending to pay, there may not be a crime, but you may find out about what I call “OJ-Justice” - you get found not guilty, but you go broke from the cost of fighting the charges. Any simple case is not cheap, and if a DA wants to be a dick about it, they file charges and let you pay for the lawyers to sort it out.
Not sure how putting a fake address figures into the above, versus on-line impersonation and identity theft but the (very small) chance of drawing the attention of the SS (Secret Service) is probably not fun. Who knows what criteria they use to put people on no-fly lists? At very least, you get an entry in their database…
Also, unless you did all this from Starbucks, before the “No-Squatting” rules came in - the online store has a record of your IP address, and if they and the DA want to be dicks about it, they can chase you down. The fine print in the terms of agreement determines if you actually committed to buy. My Wild Guess - they got bigger things to worry about in their system than goofballs simply adding a few dead records to their database. Not sure how contract law treats on-line purchases in terms of actually legally committing to a contract.
Also note that if it is an auction site, simply clicking “I’ll buy” does commit you to a legally binding offer to buy.
The moral of the story - don’t goof around online when you are involving the possibility of real money or perceived identity theft or fraud.