Google “PayPal duplicate money trick”. People are actively sending money from their own account to PayPal, claiming it fraud and doubling their money. They don’t care if they get locked out if they make $500-$1000. Change the input from their own money to a stolen PayPal account. It’s a payday for them (that eventually comes back to haunt them)

But, why use a random person’s paypal account as the destination?

When your time is cheap, making a few bucks a day scamming probably beats working all day carrying bricks or working in a diamond mine, or whatever.

I think the key to this scam is to send fake emails pretending to be paypal. So you email someone "hey i accidentally sent you money, can you send it back" and then you also send from your [email protected] email address something like "so and so sent you money on paypal, spend it right now wow this is amazing". Paypal is never actually involved until you send them money.

(I think these are all Zelle scams these days. I don't really know what Zelle is, but it seems like all the banks got together and were like "how can we really screw over our customers?" and this is what they came up with. You really can't reverse transactions? Why would I use a bank for that when I can easily lose all my money to scams with Bitcoin? It's so crazy to me.)

With great power comes great responsibility. Non-reversible transactions are dangerous in the sense that you can't reverse them, but that's the case with cash (not to mention handing over physical goods). But it cuts both ways: it means if somebody pays you what they owe you, there's no way for them to claw it back later.

tl;dr Want a permanent transaction? Use cash or Zelle. Want the ability to reverse a transaction or dispute a charge? Use a check or credit card.

It is good for stuff like craigslist or splitting checks.

The following scam works with craigslist + paypal, but not zelle:

You sell me an expensive item. I paypal you the money. You check your account and see that the money landed. I walk away with the item and immediately reverse the paypal transaction.

Note that the “I sell you a stolen/broken thing that will definitely be traced to you” scam works on both paypal and zelle, since the time to discovery of the scam is long enough to pull the money out of PayPal.

I’m not sure how hard it is to set up a burner zelle account and use it for untraceable crimes. It’s apparently easy to do that with paypal.

But, to your point, yes, they’re both pretty terrible services from a consumer protection standpoint.