I’m about to close a sale for a sizable bit of merchandise via PayPal. Now comes a twist: The buyer says “I was so excited ( :dubious: ) I changed 2 letters around and sent the money to the wrong address.” It’s a Gmail address, as is mine, and it comes up as already taken when I try to register it.
My buyer says I can phone PayPal and “add it” to my account. Is this possible even though the address (apparently) belongs to someone else? He forwarded 2 emails from PP with the transaction info.
We can cancel the payment but it takes a few days. No problem for me. But I wanted to check and see if “misspelled email” or “missent payment” represent any well-known fraud scheme. Could he try to scam me by registering the misspelled address, then sending his own money to himself???
PayPal used to and I assume still does confirm email addresses by sending you a message and awaiting a reply. You could of course create this email address (if it’s not already owned) and things would be fine.
If it is already owned, you can’t create it and of course could not confirm it. So the phone thing might work, but I doubt PayPal would want to do this other than as a one-time correction since they’d of course like to get the true owner as a PayPal customer as well.
And I’m not sure they’d want to do even that. The “reverse” scam where the typed in address was real, but the fake “true-claimed” address belonged to the buyer seems equally likely to me.
Obviously the thing to do is contact PayPal and see what they say.
IMHO, I don’t see why you should call PayPal to move the funds from the other account. I think it’s up to the buyer to call them and attempt to reverse the money transfer. (Or he/she can just pay you and then work on a refund on his/her own time.)
There is no way to verifiably prove a person sent money to someone via paypal without direct access to one of their accounts.
You can’t do anything about someone else’s payment to a 3rd party. This seems very suspicious to me. It’s possible he’s just confused but the burden is entirely on him to correct the payment.
The scam could be he sends you fake paypal contact info and tries to get you to reveal your account information. Maybe he’ll follow it up with an official looking email sent to you from ‘paypal’ asking you to go to their website (his website) and log in (steal your account info). Alternatively, he could be trying to get you to do something that would result in you losing money through direct contact with paypal but this seems unlikely. Did he give you specific instructions of any kind? If it is a scam odds are he’s sending it to many other people (maybe with slight variations). A google search of blocks of the suspicious text may very well bring up some good info.
The best course of action is doing nothing until you receive payment. Also be wary of emails you receive from ‘paypal’ or further unusual instructions from the buyer. Only log into paypal by going to the site directly and don’t click on links in emails.
OK - thanks to all responders. Buyer is canceling the payment and will remit to my real email when the funds reappear in his bank. Of course I won’t ship the merch till then.