I’ve had an interesting account takeover case to assist my next door neighbour with. Or to be more correct trying to get the situation rectified has proved interesting.
He rang me late Thursday evening to tell me he’d had three PayPal payment notifications for xBox live vouchers. I suggested he ring PayPal but the call wasn’t that fruitful so he popped around to my house late evening. We rang PayPal around 9.45pm and they suggested he cancel his credit card to stop further payments being charged but were unable to be really helpful as everyone in the fraud department had gone home so suggested calling back the next day. They did reassure us that the funds would be returned so not to worry.
That was a bit of a surprise, but with the card cancelled with the bank (who were more than willing and able to help at that late hour) we knew that no further payments could be taken.
The next day we called back and they assured us refunds would be forthcoming, but a day later only one payment had been refunded. It was then that we discovered that it wasn’t the PayPal account that was compromised, it was actually his eBay account. The reason payments had been taken is that he’d done the PayPal link to connect his eBay and PayPal accounts for one click purchasing.
PayPal told us they were unable to help further, so it was time to phone eBay. They assured us things would be sorted and sent an email to reset the password – we’d already done that by now on both PayPal and eBay but there was no harm in resetting the password again.
That brings us to yesterday when I asked if he’d had the refunds, but no – he’s still waiting for them so we called eBay again. This time they assure us that within 24 to 48 hours the fraudulent sales will be removed from his eBay account enabling PayPal to process the refunds.
It’s been a bit of a hassle to be honest, more so than when eBay and PayPal were the same company. Surely if you telephone PayPal to complain about fraudulent transactions they should be able to help without reference to eBay? Equally we don’t know why the first call to eBay didn’t get the matter resolved and we had to call a second time… We’re still waiting to see the refunds actioned.
Have you had an account take over since the PayPal spin off – have you had any difficulties getting your funds returned?
6 Responses
This is the precise reason why I never link my accounts together! It makes it too easy for fraud and getting help is a nightmare.
It happens all the time they hardly care, PayPal is now worth 50 billion and eBay worth the same
This doesn’t really have anything to do with the eBay/PayPal split. For years you could setup a Billing Agreement between PayPal and any service that could be abused like this. Usually this is only used for subscriptions but can be used for anything.
If you integrate via Braintree you can also use a feature called Future Payments which lets you charge a PayPal account any time you want just like a credit or debit card.
damn shameful behaviour.
“we want to be recognised as THE premier payment gateway worldwide…. everyones’s out on lunch we cant help with fraud enquiries rigth now”.
Just had an interesting scam via paypal this week, last month sold a few items via ebay global shipping, a few days ago get a paypal case opened due to damaged in transit, asked for a partial refund – so calls paypal to let them know that this is an ebay global shipping item so any claim must be to them and turns out the guy has already claimed direct from ebay (so I dont know about this) and got a refund now trying to add a bit extra to his purse by asking me to partial refund – passed from paypal to ebay fraud team