Scam watch: PayPal T&Cs exploited to defraud seller

Yes, a slick scam. I am missing a point though, for I cannot see how PayPal is involved if the scammers were obtaining and passing on the daughter’s bank details ( sort code etc). Was it maybe the daughter’s PayPal address which was passed? Perhaps I am a nit picker, but to understand PayPal t&cs, that would be an essential skill.

Duncan, your comment was as complicated, if not more so than the subject on hand 🙂

I’ve just been transferring my energy to E.ON – thanks John W., you prompted this as they have a new deal that suits me. However, that has left my brain a little tired, and I, too, am confused by this tale. If money was transferred to Jim’s daughter’s bank account directly from the purchaser’s bank account, then I don’t see where PayPal come into this. Clearly I have missed something, but I wish these Intros were edited to make sure they were clear as to facts. Perhaps it could be modified to explain the true situation more clearly?

I have just clicked on “Paypals terms of sale” in the header, they are a joke! How anyone can understand or even plough through them is enough to put anyone off purchasing anything with their ‘protection’?
Self protection is the aim here I would guess!

I find this not only bizarre and the most awkward way of getting a free second hand laptop imaginable, but there are quite a few unanswered questions. I’ve taken the time to break the case down into its 3 associated components.

Part 1
Victim advertises Laptop on Gumtree
Female offers to buy it
Victim provides her bank details to Female
Paypal enters and claims victim has been paid for iPhone from Victim.

Part 2
Female had seen Gumtree ad for laptop
Female advertises non-existent iPhone on – what? Was that ebay?
Female claims her iPhone buyer was asked to pay money into Victim’s account (Crime)
Female provides Victim’s bank details (Crime)

So Paypal was clearly the method used to pay in Part 2, but why Paypal? This is the part that’s far from clear to me. When you use Paypal, as I do very rarely, you don’t provide your bank details at all. You only provide them in the initial instance to Paypal themselves. So there’s a clear disconnect between parts 1 and 2.

Part 3
iPhone buyer doesn’t get iPhone
iPhone buyer asks Paypal for refund
Police say no crime…
Paypal claim their hands are clean

There’s far too much which doesn’t add up to me. The needless transferring of bank details, the claimed gullibility of the victim, the Police’s apparent lack of interest, the sheer needless complexity of the entire arrangement.

I discussed this in detail with my other half, whose professional expertise as an expert witness in court has equipped her well to deal with behaviour like this and she arrived at a very rapid conclusion. In effect, the entire Victim tale sounds contrived and convoluted. Derek made the most obvious point (above) and it may well be that the Father (the member) had believed his poor daughter’s sorry tale without question. In effect it would be very interesting to hear exactly what had happened from alleged victim. One has to wonder if the Police actually interviewed the victim and, if so, how searching were their questions. On balance, then, it all sounds a tad fishy.

For balance I would add that Googling “Kreb – paypal hack” will reveal just how poor Paypal’s security really is, however. Kreb was hacked through a socially engineered approach, and didn’t need malware.

And the issue of why the police concluded there’d been ‘no crime’ remains a mystery.

In which case the ‘buyer’ (scammer) of the laptop was able to flaunt the PayPal T&C’s by arranging to collect the laptop “in person” from the seller (victim) who omitted to either obtain a contact address or was given a false address by the buyer (scammer). The seller (victim) must have felt confident inasmuchas it was OK to hand the laptop over as she had already received payment for it, which is key, because this is where the scammer gained a psychological advantage over the unsuspecting victim.

If the victim was ‘the friend’ whose account details were used to transfer the money for the non-existent iPhone then was it not possible to trace the person who paid the money into the victims account who thought she was paying for the fake advertised iPhone and explain the situation that they had both been the victims of cyber crime?

Ian your last paragraph could be explained quite simply. Do you remember the party game we used to play as children called Chinese Whispers where one person was given a written message and told to whisper the message into the ear of the person sitting next to them and telling them to pass it onto the next person until the last person sitting around the table came up with an entirely different message to the original? This is happening in real life all the time through the media and all other communication systems so everyone ultimately receives a distorted version of the original true story.

I don’t think the crucial element of Paypal’s conditions is either difficult or unclear: “‘a key eligibility requirement of the Seller Protection Programme is that the seller must post the item to the address which appears on the transaction details page’ “. To me that’s basic common-sense. And here’s where anyone ought to have smelt a rat. If the alleged Female scammer was able to collect the laptop in person (presumably the only way it could be delivered other than by post as per Paypal’s Ts and Cs) the obvious question is why the money wasn’t delivered at the same time.

Now, I can accept some social engineering has gone on to convince the victim that there was a perfectly logical reason why the money first had to be transferred to her bank account instead of being personally handed over, clearly the most secure method, but I can’t understand how the victim didn’t pause for thought and ask her father whether this was an acceptable practice. It simply doesn’t make sense.

I’m also very curious as to the Police response. That doesn’t make sense, either.

I appreciate I’m like a dog with a bone, here, but I’m still disturbed that the Gloria Hunniford story ran with the tagline ‘Scammed’ in it, when nothing could have been further from the truth. Hunniford wasn’t scammed in any sense of the word. Her bank was defrauded, but she wasn’t.

I’ve trawled Google to see if anything remotely as complicated or even similar as this supposed scam exists. I can’t find anything, although scams on Gumtree seem to abound. The bottom line is for people to learn how to use Escrow – http : // transpact . com / . That solves a multitude of problems concerning buyers and sellers.

What we have here is a partial story – a hearsay item as Beryl suggests – and I think Which? really should either supply more details about this case or close it down.

Im confused too. Surely the scammer breached pay pal too, regardless of whether the innocent seller did, with intent to defraud because they advertised a non existent item with someone else’s PayPal details they were not authorized to use. I would have thought PayPal would be v interested in that. Even if they cannot directly get the money back as the iPhone buyer was a victim too.

There is an online fraud reporting arm of the police. I have used it before. The regular police don’t have much to do with it. But the internet fraud detection team which you can report to online are better.

The respective sites where the laptop and iPhone were advertised are not mentioned. Reporting to those may also help (may not too) as sometimes it is a repeat offender which fraud, eBay, PayPal and the likes become aware of.

I was lucky to get money back from a fraudulent ipad sale on eBay a few years ago and reported it to internet fraud. But it was nothing as complicated as this!

Studies show that just 7% of people read the full terms and conditions so why is this? I have my own opinions but ‘the guardian.com – Surveys Show That Just 7% of Britons Read the Full Terms and Conditions’ explains it better than I can.

The fairest way to part solve this particular case is for the two victims to agree to each share one half of the £250 illegally paid to Jims daughter for the laptop. I say “part solve” because this action still lets the scammers off the hook leaving them free to continue with their crimes until terms and conditions are simplified and shortened, excluding all complicated legal terminology and written in a way that everyone can understand and therefore will be more motivated to read them.

Anyone interested in reading up on the science behind the fear of cyber threats and paranoia, the following website may appeal to some of the more scientific minded commenters@ journal.frontiersin.org – Ever-Present Threats From Information Technology: the Cyber-Paranoia and Fear Scale.

Apparently “older people and women exhibited the greatest fear; despite young males being the most victimized”.