I received an email today telling me that I had received a payment into my PayPal account. This was unexpected.
The payment I received was exactly £10.00. Note that I didn’t click any links in the notification email - I logged into PayPal directly and there is genuinely a payment there.
I just used the “message sender” feature to send them a message asking what the payment is, but in the meantime, has anyone come across anything like this before?
I’ve had payments turn out to be tests, to see if the paypal account is genuine.
Sum seems a tad large, though.
Could it be a refund for something?
I’d be wary of this:
"How the scam works:
10 quid doesn’t seem like a very ambitious scam.
Mystery solved. It was a genuine payment for a small sum. A while ago on another forum I frequent I offered an item to a good home if the recipient payed for the postage, which I’d told them would be around £3.
They rounded it up to a tenner to fund a thank you beer (yum), and paid it out of their partner’s account, a name I didn’t recognise.
They’ve since PM’d me on the other forum to tell me they’ve done this, including the name of his partner, which matches the payment. So we’re all good.
It’s only a decade or so ago that banks in the UK allowed people who transferred money to attach a name that the recipient can see.
A friend used to organise trips abroad and many people would transfer deposits and final payments. She had no way of knowing who had paid what until the banks made this change.
It certainly helps with this, as well as enabling us to spot fraudulent transfers, although it can take some work to identify who BPX3824-AY is attached to a payment of £116.44.
…unfortunately, even something as simple as this can be abused 
that first suggestion was interesting - I assume it meant:
Bob gets payment from out of the blue for $10 from Jane.
Bob is told “is mistake, please send to Fred”.
Bob sends $10 to Fred.
Original $10 deposit to Bob was done with stolen card, gets reversed out of Bob’s account.
Fred meanwhile disappears with the (real) money.
Sounds like it might work, except someone need to come up with 2 Paypal accounts - Jane and Fred - and I agree is a lot of work for $10. (Is a pound still worth more than a dollar?). How easy is it to get cash out of Paypal?
Okay, there is a scam going around that has cost one older couple their retirement savings. An entity will deposit money in your account. They then call and identify themselves (fake) as a business entity that has made a mistake in depositing money in your account. When you check, sure enough, the money they say is in fact there, so they sound believable. They then ask you to send the money back. Then, they call and say there was a problem and have not received it, so they ask you to send the money again … and again … and again if they can get your to do it. So you could end up losing 3 or 4 times the money they initially invested in the scam. The couple I mentioned received $40,000 and ended up losing $80,000 when it was all said and done.
If it is a scam, they’re almost certainly sending out more than one payment. $10 a thousand times, even with a poor hit rate adds up.
I have never seen reports from anywhere else, but I can well imagine it happening: Obscenities with child-support or maintenance payments and using it as a means of contact when social media is blocked.
I imagine it shouldn’t be difficult for the banks to control it though.
I saw a thread on Reddit once about people using the “message” field in an online transaction - in this case it was jokey banter with a friend rather than abuse - “MONEY4DRUGS” and the like.
The gist of the thread was that the banks take that seriously and it can impact credit ratings and mortgage approvals.
Abuse via online-transaction message fields. Sheesh. Once again, something that just never occurred to me.
I guess I just don’t think that way by default…
I wonder what they’d do if I didn’t return the money…
Yeah, I’m not saying this didn’t happen, but it seems pretty implausible that a scammer would risk $40,000 of their own money betting that some random person is honest and/or gullible enough to return a windfall, not once, but multiple times.
That was exactly my immediate thought with the $40 thousand situation. Maybe there is a legal option for recovering it? In any case, I might not have even believed it happened except for the fact that it was an “I-team” report on channel 7 news with an interview with the victims.
I guess the trick is to put it into the system - via the scammer’s throw-away first account - using a stolen credit card. Then time is of the essence to get the victim to forward it to second scammer account (“oops, that was meant for Bob, please forward the money to him…”) before the credit card fraud is discovered and the original deposit reversed, leaving the victim out of pocket. By the time he complains and tries to get his transaction reversed, the second account is also emptied into the scammer’s pocket, no money to recover.
The problem with any electronic transaction is turning it to untraceable cash…