It is obviously a scam, because
- I don’t know the senders
- It’s to an email address I no longer use and that gets spammed frequently
- It’s from a PayPal affiliate in the country of the email domain (I no longer live there)
What is the game here? Is it to confirm my email address is real? Will they claim the money back? Or would I become a money laundering mule when they ask me to send the money back to a different account? I just can’t come up with anything that sounds remotely profitable to me.
Now, if this was a bank to bank ACH transfer, the recipient could just refuse the credit. There's an error code for this situation: R10: “Customer Advises Originator is Not Known to Receiver and/or Originator is Not Authorized by Receiver to Debit Receiver’s Account”.[1] You can contact your bank and refuse an incoming ACH transaction, which will generate this.
This is different from sending money back. It says to the banking system that the transaction was rejected and did not complete. So you're not sending the unknown originator your money. You're refusing to take their money. This eliminates the possibility of a reversal from their end costing you money. It also marks the transaction as an error in the banks at both ends. This is useful, because many errors on an account are an alarm condition and will get the attention of some fraud department.
If you have to reverse a transaction, do it fast. There are time limits for the simple paths.
(A friend of mine runs a bank branch of a major bank. Much of her day is spent straightening out error situations like this.)
[1] "https://www.nacha.org/rules/differentiating-unauthorized-ret...
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.
I had a Northwest Airlines VISA card in the early 2000s.
One day, I noticed a USD $6,000 deposit. I sent a message to customer service that something was wrong.
The next day, I noticed a $5,800 withdrawal. At this point, I called customer service.
They removed the deposit right away, but I had to engage repeatedly to get the withdrawal off my statement. I think this involved some kind of written statement.
I've also had Discover call me, asking if I ordered a $1,200 television off Newegg, and they sent me a new card when I replied that I did not.
I have no idea what happened in either case.
At one time (may still be the case?) someone created a Facebook account with my email address and I was able to click on a link and be logged in as them.
The UK wedding photography industry has a version of this where a potential client sends a check for the deposit, and it far exceeds the amount required for the booking. They say the mistake is because they were supposed to book flowers etc and ask you to transfer the difference back asap. A year later it turns out the check was stolen or fake and the deposited funds vanish from your account and the culprit is long gone. It's fun to have them send the check, then pretend the police are now involved since you tried to deposit it.
It probably is a scam where they try to get you to let them log into your bank account and “accidentally” transfer too much money which you can conveniently return to them with gift cards. Or some variation on the theme.
There’s also some PayPal invoicing scam going around where they send random people bills through PayPal and use that to get the scam rolling.
If it were me I’d just ignore it unless they are sending real money to you, in that case I’d just consider it a stupid tax and keep the money after a while (in case of chargebacks).
It’s a small amount of probably fraudulent money, but small enough that you might just do it. And I guess the hope is enough people do to make it add up to some good recurring income.
Would love to hear if there’s more to it than that.