Ask HN: What’s the deal with random people sending me money over PayPal?

Re:Ask HN: What’s the deal with random people sending me mon... by Waterluvian on Saturday June 03, 2023 @03:17PM (#36179666)

I had a similar fraud that PayPal is somewhat complicit in because how how their system works:

I get an official PayPal email. But it’s on behalf of a vendor who is asking for money. But they’ve carefully crafted the request to look like a receipt. As if I’ve already paid $300 for textbooks and this is my receipt. But just a few unwitting clicks and I’ll have accepted the transfer request.

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Re:Ask HN: What’s the deal with random people sending me mon... by shortcake27 on Saturday June 03, 2023 @03:55PM (#36179971)

I have been getting a few of these per week for the past couple of years. It’s really frustrating as the payment request comes from PayPal so won’t be flagged as spam, and there’s no way to “unsubscribe” because you get the email whether you have a PayPal account or not. I keep forwarding them to [email protected] and nothing happens. At this point, I would definitely consider PayPal to be complicit.

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Re:Ask HN: What’s the deal with random people sending me mon... by millzlane on Saturday June 03, 2023 @04:21PM (#36180174)

Data is everything in 2023. Paypal absolutely knows exactly how much money they are getting from these types of emails. It shouldn't be much work to find that in their sent folder.

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Re:Ask HN: What’s the deal with random people sending me mon... by plagiarist on Saturday June 03, 2023 @05:56PM (#36180904)

For every email, I would send an abuse complaint to the registrar on their whois lookup, which right now is Markmonitor [0]. I have done this to get one spammy website's emails shut off before, when they weren't including unsubscribe links. Of course they were back on their same bullshit weeks later, but I was able to unsubscribe successfully.

IDK, maybe PayPal is too powerful or whatever they're doing here is technically legal, but it is worth a shot.

[0] https://www.markmonitor.com/legal/abuse-policy

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Re:Ask HN: What’s the deal with random people sending me mon... by rvba on Saturday June 03, 2023 @06:29PM (#36181136)

I dont understand why the courts dont treat this as fencing, or wire fraud.

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Re:Ask HN: What’s the deal with random people sending me mon... by NoZebra120vClip on Saturday June 03, 2023 @06:02PM (#36180949)

PayPal makes it absolutely simple for anyone to generate an invoice. I sent a package to my friend out of state, and I invoiced him for the shipping charges just as a lark, and he duly paid his bill. We'd pre-arranged it all, so everything was legitimate, but all I needed was his email address.

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