Re: [asterisk-biz] FRAUD: BE AWARE

On Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 11:15 PM, Trixter aka Bret McDanel <trixter@0xdecafbad.com> wrote:

On Sun, 2008-04-20 at 21:47 +0300, Justin Case wrote:
> Hi List,
> I made the mistake of having auto payments via PayPal. Just had some
> one put in payments and have them all denied. So far this person send
> in funds from:

Yeah, you have to be careful with paypal because there are several ways
to make a payment that appears to clear on the merchant side (ie it
looks like any other normal payment) but after a few days it will bounce
back.

I have seen a series of payments (about 20 or so) that all cleared, and
got refunded a month later because paypal said that money was never
cleared.  Some of these payments were hundreds of dollars some were
about $45, but all eventually got returned.

It really isnt hard to do this, and paypal has little incentive to
change this since they dont lose money.  It all has to do with one way
of funding your account (gee there are only 3 ways really).  There are
probably other ways of it looking like money is there when it really
isnt.  At least with an e-check paypal notifies the merchant at the
payment time that the money is pending (so hint this is not what I am
talking about).

I do not know if disputing with a credit card would prove useful,
although most likely it would and would be more obvious to more people
so its probably the larger way that people would do this type of stuff.

In the end paypal makes the merchant pay for using their services and
its hard to hold the customer accountable.  It generally becomes a civil
suit for failure to pay in a situation like that (getting a criminal
investigation over stuff like that is generally hard at least in the US)
which means that the merchant again would have to bear the costs of
locating and serving the defendant, and they would not be able to do
anything cross border, blah blah blah.  Cant imagine why so many
criminals use paypal.

Trixter,
They made several payments  from multiple accounts which seems that they fished them. I still don't know how people fall for those scam emails. Then again they scammed me :( . I guess we goto be tighter on sign ups. Does any one know if there are any merchant companies out there that have some sort of insurance for the merchant should something like this happen in the future ?

/J