Is this Ebayer cheating me?

Factual Questions
1

I’m feeling quite ignorant here…

I just sold something pretty expensive on Ebay and I’m receiving the money through Paypal. I have never gotten money through Paypal for an Ebay auction and I don’t know much about it…

This looks pretty suspicious. My buyer has feedback of 0 (and so did most of my top bidders), and she sent me this E-mail. Please note that it came from her E-mail address at hotmail, and not from Ebay.

My Paypal balance is still at 0 and Ebay says I haven’t received any payment.

So… er… is it fake? If it is, what do I do? And how do I prevent this? Can I choose not to accept bids from people with 0 feedback?

Dear myemail@address.com,

You’ve got cash!

This email confirms that you have received an Auction Instant Purchase
Payment for $XXXXX USD from XXXXX (mailto:XXXXX@hotmail.com)

Item Information for (her name here)

(Item and price info)

(her name here)'s UNCONFIRMED Address

XXXXX (her name here)
Important Note: XXXXX has provided an Unconfirmed Address. If you
are planning on shipping items to (her name here), please check the
Transaction Details page of this payment to find out whether you will be
covered by the PayPal Seller Protection Policy.
Our records indicate that this email address is unconfirmed. In order to
receive this cash, you must first confirm your email address.

You can complete the Email Address Confirmation process by clicking on the
following link and then entering your password:

https://www.paypal.com/ece/cn=(numbers and stuff)

If your email program has problems with hypertext links, then you may also
confirm your email address by logging into your PayPal account at
PayPal.com. On your My Account page there will be a link Confirm Your Email
Address. Click on this link and when requested, enter the following
confirmation number:

XXXXX
Thank you for using PayPal!
The PayPal Team

Try the New PayPal Shopping Cart!

Accept PayPal from your store or website with the new PayPal Shopping Cart.
It’s completely free and easy for your customers to use.

Set-up only requires a few lines of HTML which you can generate by logging
in to your PayPal account. And you can easily switch any existing PayPal
Website Payments button to be compatible with the Shopping Cart.

The PayPal Shopping Cart is the ultimate way to turn your website visits
into sales. To learn more, visit our website today:
http://www.paypal.com/row/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/xcl/rec/sc-outside

PayPal Email ID PP342

2

This is from the header of my E-mail. Anywhere it had her E-mail I’ve replaced it with aw@hotmail.com and mine is replaced with jen@email.com

[TO HIDE HEADER, EDIT MY PREFERENCE]
Received: from smtp-outbound.nix.paypal.com [64.4.240.67] by dpmail08.doteasy.com with ESMTP
(SMTPD32-8.05) id A7ADAA0146; Thu, 09 Sep 2004 15:22:37 -0700
Received: from web32.nix.paypal.com (web32.nix.paypal.com [10.192.2.32])
by smtp-outbound.nix.paypal.com (Postfix) with SMTP id 176C98223D9
for <jen@email.com>; Thu, 9 Sep 2004 15:13:28 -0700 (PDT)
Received: (qmail 24842 invoked by uid 99); 9 Sep 2004 22:13:28 -0000
Date: Thu, 09 Sep 2004 15:13:28 -0700
Message-Id: <1094768008.24842@paypal.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
From: aw@hotmail.com
To: <jen@email.com>
Subject: Notification of an Instant Purchase Payment Received from hernamehere aw@hotmail.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
X-RCPT-TO: <jen@email.com>
Status: R
X-UIDL: 317166852

doteasy.com is my web host/e-mail provider

3

You might want to take her real name out of the body of the email.

I reported the post for ya.

4

It sounds HIGHLY suspicious to me.

What I’d do: Immediately report it to Paypal as suspicious. And within what would be a reasonable length of time (but no earlier) reply to the bidder, saying “my paypal account hasn’t been credited, I’ll get in touch with Paypal and ask what’s going on”.

5

D’oh! I had a feeling I’d accidentally leave it in there somewhere.
I don’t really mind it being there, since she seems to want to screw me and all.

6

Simply e-mail her and ask her when she is going to send a payment. If money isn’t paid in a reasonable amount of time (your choice how long that is) you can report her as a non-paying bidder. Just don’t even think about sending the item until you get paid. Stuff like this is common with Ebay and Paypal.

7

Another suspicious thing is how very much she bid for this item. When I got it I paid quite a bit, but since a new model is out, it’s dropped in price. It now costs not much more than she bid.

She gave me her mailing address. That seems like a dumb thing to do if you’re going to cheat someone that lives only 1000km away and could very likely visit your city on a regular basis. It’s a real address (not a P.O. box).

I’m confused, but this keeps looking more like someone angling for a free electronic!

8

That email did not come from hotmail. It came from PayPal. Recheck your balance in the morning. If it stands at $0 contact PayPal. Include a copy of the email. If told nothing has come through, contrary to the email, then contact the buyer so she may initiate a trace.

Or, to fuel the suspicions surrounding the transaction, she could have done a chargeback. That would show in your PayPal account.

I would wait until tomorrow before I got too excited.

9

Red flag! PayPal states that all e-mails from them will address you by first and last name.

I thought this was a red flag too–I was under the impression that PayPal would never ask you to click on a link and then enter your password, but I can’t find this statement on their site.

It is true that under some circumstances you have to go to the site and “accept” a payment from an unconfirmed address.

Now this is more like what I’d expect PayPal to ask you to do if they needed some kind of confirmation, and I can’t see what harm it could do.

10

I had something similar happen to me on Ebay (Weird Paypal e-mail but no payment had come in). IIRC, the person had e-mailed a Paypal payment to a contact e-mail address that was not on my Paypal account. All I had to do was to add that e-mail address to my Paypal account to be able to receive the money. Did the e-mail come to an alternate address, or is an alternate address the one that’s on your Paypal account? Perhaps something like that is what happened to you…?

11

You might try checking the various online phone/address lookups and see if you find her name (or possibly a husband’s name) listed with that same address.

If you don’t, then she might just be someone with an unlisted number, or someone who recently moved or changed phone service, or … she might be trying to scam you.

Personally, I’d begin to worry if I couldn’t find her name & that address listed.

12

Don’t panic; just don’t send the merch until you get the money. Paypal can be a little intimidating at first.

13

Kind of… I have my own URL so I have several aliases leading to my main mailbox. This went to paypal@mydomain.com(the account I’m using for Paypal), which forwarded to my main E-mail. But that doesn’t seem like it would be a problem, because for all Paypal knows, paypal@mydomain.com is a bona fide E-mail account.

14

This part of the email is the reason your PayPal balance is still zero:

You must follow the instructions to confirm your email address before the money will show up in your balance. No one is trying to cheat you.

15

Oh, this is driving me crazy!
It seems it might not be a scam. I say this because:
-The E-mails I’ve gotten directly from the buyer say different things in the header text (that gobbledigook in my second post with the mail servers) than the ones that I know are from Paypal. Hers mention being from Hotmail and all Paypal ones mention paypal somewhere in there.

-As one person mentioned above, E-bay sends a message ‘from’ the person that sent money. When I first set up the account all of 10 days ago I got my boyfriend to send me a test-donation (of 12 cents!) and the message looks the same. This is contradictory to what they say on their warning page.

It does seem to be a problem with me using an E-mail alias(paypal@mydomain.com). It’s fine and well when they send me E-mails, but when I replied to verify my E-mail they saw that it was from a different address(mymainaccount@mydomain.com) and so it didn’t get verified.

The Paypal website isn’t available until 3:00am PDT

So, when I solve this I will tell you all what happened. I know it’s not as exciting as a soap opera, but I really appreciate the responses and would like to let you all know the outcome.

16

I’m pretty sure you’re right. When I looked in my E-mail this afternoon to see the results of my auction, I was excited and confused and not thinking quite straight. I saw an E-mail allegedly straight from the buyer with a link inside and didn’t know if it was a good idea to follow it.
Paypal is down at the moment, but I will verify my account in the morning. I’ve figured out why it didn’t verify the first time (explained in previous post)

Thanks!

-Jen

17

I had one like this; my paypal account was set up to use my hotmail address, but my eBay account was set up with an address in my own domain; usually, this didn’t present a problem, as I would always put my hotmail address in the listing details when creating the auction.

The trouble came when one buyer, with whom I had been in conversation over some detail, won the auction and generated his paypal payment manually (i.e. by going to his account and clicking ‘send money to…’, rather than using the ‘pay now’ option in eBay) - the payment left his account, but didn’t go into mine until I added my domain email address to my paypal account. The problem was further complicated by the fact that the ‘you’ve got cash’ message got misidentified as spam and filtered out.

If you have any other email addresses that you use in connection with ebay or ebay customers, add them to your paypal account and the money will probably be there waiting.

18

I finally verified my account and saw that the money is there now. Now I feel like a big ass for besmirching an innocent person’s name!

I think Paypal should change their payment received message to saying it’s come from Paypal instead of saying it came directly from the member’s e-mail address. She could have sent it herself and it would have looked the same.

Thank you all!

19

not to make you paranoid or whatever,but still be wary of (0) feedback. if you withdraw the money to your bank account etc. then send the item he/she could then do a charge back on his card and paypal will freeze your account and tell you you owe that amount. there are various paypal scams out there and the fact he is uncomfirmed also worries me, because the only problem customer I ever had was unconfirmed. The guy claimed the software I sold him would not install and was damaged and he was gonna do a chargeback. needless to say I took the hit and returned his money and was left with opened software I could not resell. check out paypalsuck.com for info on these. that said i have always used paypal and never had any problems but that one i mentioned and i have done a lot o business with (0) feedback people for high price items. It is just that paypal gives more protection to the buyer than the seller.