Yesterday, I nearly fell victim to a fake PayPal scam, and wanted to share so that others won’t come as close to being ripped off as I was.
TL;DR - Someone tried to get me to ship expensive shoes to them by sending me fake PayPal emails telling me my account had been credited when it really hadn’t. Also, spoiler alert, everything turned out okay for me.
A few days ago, I posted a pair of Hunter rain boots on Kijiji (for those not familiar, Kijiji is a buy and sell website that has gained a ton of traction across Canada, but especially in Atlantic Canada - Craigslist is much less popular here). The rain boots typically retail for $160 CAD, and I had listed them at $115, or best offer.
I received a text asking if the boots were still available, and offering the full retail value of $160 if I would ship them to an address in Ontario. Offering so much above my asking price should have made me suspicious, especially when you consider that shipping the boots would only cost about $25-$40, but I figured maybe the buyer just really wanted these boots in this particular discontinued colour. Now, let’s get into the scam. And keep in mind (as you can see in the attached screenshots), I’d never used PayPal to receive money before.
The buyer asked for the email address attached to my PayPal account so he could send me the money. In order to actually receive the money, I had to send the tracking number to PayPal - seems legit, makes sure I actually send the product before I get any money for it. After this, the buyer got very impatient. I didn't include all of the texts in the attached images because it would have added a lot of bulk to the album, but this guy was consistently texting me all day while I was out running errands, to the point that I had to tell him to stop or I would find another buyer.
He once again became very persistent once he had the tracking number, asking if I’d received a confirmation email from PayPal, told me to check my spam folder, etc., which made me very suspicious - especially when immediately after a couple of texts, I got the confirmation email. This is where the red flags really started waving for me.
As you can see in this screenshot, $160 apparently exceeded my PayPal account limit and my most recent buyer would have to send me an additional $450 in order to increase my limit. Not to mention, it was written in very broken English which is not congruent with my past experiences using this company. I decided to call PayPal to check the status of my account because I wasn’t sure if this guy was somehow hacking into it or if this was just a lie complete with fake emails. PayPal told me there was no recent activity on my account (which was a relief - at least he wasn't a hacker of some sort), but that also meant it was a scam, because they had no record of $160 being sent to me. Once I expressed that I was suspicious, he got quite desperate to finish the sale.
I immediately went to the post office and asked for the package back. Luckily I had dropped it off after the last delivery of the day and was able to get it back - this explains why the buyer was so persistent about me going to the post office and checking my email.
The lesson here is the same as many online scams - if it’s too good to be true, it probably is. If someone is offering you the full retail value for a pair of discontinued and also used rain boots, be wary. I just wanted to share the fake PayPal emails so that others who might fall victim to this can identify them - broken English, account limits that don’t make sense, odd email suffixes (@mail?), etc. Don’t make the mistake I almost made!
I’ve removed all personal or identifying information from the texts and emails to abide by Reddit’s no witch hunting rules. As much as I’d love for this piece of human trash to get endless packages filled with dog poop, I’ll play nice and just be content with the fact that he didn’t get a free pair of boots.
Edit: Formatting is hard.
Submitted July 13, 2017 at 01:29PM by carlicardashian http://ift.tt/2uWpZwP
