Wow, this George Harrison guy really has his mind set on you. But I think you’ve made the right call, just tell him it’s the end of the line.
But it’s alright!
Wouldn’t want to be this dude when the taxman comes calling though.
My Sweet Lord, the things scammers come up with these days
Oh this isn’t a new scam, overpayment scams have been around forever. It’s just that they used to be done with bogus checks/cashiers checks/money orders/etc.
Good point, all things must pass.
I would be imagining George Harrison gently weeping, but it’s really Eric Clapton
If he gets his money back, he’ll say, “Here comes the sum.”
Yeah, tell him to suck it while his guitar gently weeps.
take the full amount out and close the acct :D
No, but seriously is this 100% a scam
Isn’t it a pity that people’s descend into these kinds of scams? What is life if that’s all there is for you?
I keep getting the “Here’s your invoice for $XXX, please click here to acknowledge with PayPal and approve this invoice!”
Like, fuck off.
Usually they ask for the money back, but the money never actually gets into your account, so your are out the funds they pretend got accidentally sent to you. I would ignore the entire thing and block the sender. If he DID send you accidntal money, somehow to a random stranger, that’s his life lesson to learn.
Seeing a lot of paypal scams lately.
I say fuck off and die. And then block them.
I’m still trying to figure out how this works. They send you funds from a stolen credit card. You refund it. The person who had the stolen card sees the charge and calls their credit card company, and they nullify the charge. Yet you end up being hosed.
How the scam works
Sorin Mihailovici, the editor-in-chief of Scam Detector, said if I’d sent the money back, I might have found myself out $500.
He explained: The scammer steals credit card numbers — which can be purchased in bulk on the dark web — and attaches those cards to accounts on digital wallet apps like Venmo, Cashapp and Zelle. Then, they “accidentally” send money to hundreds or thousands of people at once, whose phone numbers were similarly acquired in some back-alley of the internet. A subsequent request to get the money back goes out to all the targets. Some of those people will ignore it, but others will send the money back.
Software can automate the entire process, Mihailovici said, so even if only 1% of the scam targets send money back to them, “it’s an incredible money-making machine with extremely, extremely little effort.”
The first victims, whose credit card numbers were stolen, will see the charges and get in touch with their banks, who will likely reverse the charges. So they get their money back.
But you might not.
In its support documentation on payments from strangers, Venmo notes that when you send money back, it will come from your Venmo balance, unless the amount requested is larger than your Venmo balance. Because the seller fee had been taken out, my balance was $490.40, remember?So if I’d sent Anna back a full $500, according to Venmo, it would have been funded entirely by my outside payment method, AKA my credit card or bank account.
If the first transaction was subsequently reversed, I would have had to take it up with my bank to try and get my money back — which only ends up being successful for less than 14% of scam victims on Venmo, said Steve McFarland, the president and CEO of the Better Business Bureau of Los Angeles and Silicon Valley.
Think of it this way: If someone handed you an envelope full of cash and said, “Hey, here’s the money I owe you for the antique table!” and then left and a minute later came back and said, “Never mind, you’re not the right person,” you would hand them back the same stack of bills. But that’s not exactly how it works with digital payments. A scammer sends you $500, but if the charge is reversed, that initial $500 is clawed back. The money you sent “back” is a different $500. It’s your $500.
So it’d be like someone handing you that envelope, then when they came back, you gave them a different set of bills from your wallet. Then a minute later, someone else came along and said, “That’s my envelope of cash, someone stole it from me” and took it back.
Mihailovici said Venmo is not the only app where this scam takes place, but because it’s so popular, scammers can find the most targets there. And even the updated guidance from Venmo is contradictory in places, he said: On the “payment from a stranger” page, it tells you to contact support if you get an unexpected payment; but on the “cancel a payment” page, it says if you send someone money by accident, you should ask them to send it back to you.
I would report it to PayPal proactively if you rely on your PayPal account for other things. PayPal tends to freeze accounts while sorting things out, so you want to speed that along.
I’ve been trying to report it, and every I try I get a PayPal error message that something went wrong on their end and to try again.
Then let him report it and just don’t spend it.
I got a Paypal notification on my phone from the scammer, along the lines of “So you’re going to to take my money? I thought you were a good person. I’m going to initiate a dispute with PayPal.”
But the notification disappeared from my phone and it doesn’t appear anywhere when I log in to PayPal.
I was half-tempted to respond, “You scamming scum, you admitted you sent money to a total stranger. How can you say you thought I was a good person. You go right ahead and tell PayPal about this. They see this scam all the time.”
But I didn’t want to give them any improvement tips.
Seems like your scenario is a perfect example of this.