Where are these mystery PayPal payments coming from?

August 8, 2021 5:09 AM

Every few months, we receive a random PayPal payment from someone, generally for an amount less than $5. What's going on?

We run a web-based mail order business, selling through eBay and also through an online store in our website. We do maybe 100 sales per month through eBay and another 5-10 through the website, with a fair portion of our payments coming through PayPal. Ever since about two years ago, every few months we receive a payment for a small amount of money from a different email address.

They are not linked to a specific order and come from people who seem real (they generally list an address and it matches with their name), but otherwise just seem to come out of nowhere. When I search prior orders and our email, they never come up. We've generally just refunded the payment, since it doesn't belong to us, but I'm starting to wonder what's up here. Is it possible these are compromised accounts and someone is trying to test out whether they can charge to the person's credit card? Is there any other possible explanation?

We have considered notifying PayPal but are worried they will lock our account or otherwise mess things up for us (we've had terrible experiences with their customer service). Thanks for your help!

posted by redondo77 to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Is there some reason you don't just write to the sender with a generic message such as

"Hello,

Thank you for submitting your payment. We're trying to apply this to an order, and have been unable to find an order from (emailaddress) to apply it to. Could you please let us know what you ordered, or if there is another e-mail address you might have used when ordering?

Thanks!"
posted by jgreco at 6:13 AM on August 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure I'd contact the sender, just because you don't ever want to engage with potential scammers.

I think you're definitely being used as a test, either testing stolen CC numbers, or your account is being tested for a potential chargeback scam or something similar.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:56 AM on August 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

I would recommend asking this on https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/ too.
posted by DreamerFi at 7:13 AM on August 8, 2021 [3 favorites]

All you need to pay someone some money on PayPal is their username, which is in the form of @UserName. So mistakes are easily made, especially if you have a somewhat common username without a number suffix. So for example, if your PayPal username is @RalphGreen, other Ralph Greens may have chosen @RalphGreen99, @RalphGreen101, @RalphGreenX, etc. People sending payments to any of those users, who they know personally as Ralph Green, might easily forget to add the suffix and just remit to @RalphGreen, which is you.

If that fits your situation, I think it's not scammers but simple errors of omission, and your practice of refunding is the right thing to do. I don't think actual scammers would be sending you actual money on a regular basis from accounts with identifiable names and addresses that test out correctly via something like FastPeopleSearch.
posted by beagle at 11:19 AM on August 8, 2021

Is your email address simple? I have my initials and mot uncommon last name and routinely get misdirected mail, often confidential, and have received paypal $ in error.
posted by theora55 at 11:52 AM on August 8, 2021