[asterisk-biz] FRAUD: BE AWARE

[Nitzan Kon]

To put it in plain words - PayPal could care less about the merchant. They do very little to prevent fraud, and once it's discovered the merchant gets screwed 100% of the time.

We've added Google checkout recently. SO MUCH BETTER! cheaper too. If this keeps up we'll probably drop PayPal altogether.

Another cheaper (and appears to be safer - not sure yet) option is MoneyBookers. I did hear some horror stories with them though so make sure you don't leave large sums in your account. (horror stories being accounts frozen due to "suspected fraud" and never released)

--- On Sun, 4/20/08, Trixter aka Bret McDanel <trixter at 0xdecafbad.com> wrote:

> From: Trixter aka Bret McDanel <trixter at 0xdecafbad.com>
> Subject: Re: [asterisk-biz] FRAUD: BE AWARE
> To: "Commercial and Business-Oriented Asterisk Discussion" <asterisk-biz at lists.digium.com>
> Date: Sunday, April 20, 2008, 3:15 PM
> On Sun, 2008-04-20 at 21:47 +0300, Justin Case wrote:
> > Hi List,
> > I made the mistake of having auto payments via PayPal.
> Just had some
> > one put in payments and have them all denied. So far
> this person send
> > in funds from:
> 
> 
> Yeah, you have to be careful with paypal because there are
> several ways
> to make a payment that appears to clear on the merchant
> side (ie it
> looks like any other normal payment) but after a few days
> it will bounce
> back. 
> 
> I have seen a series of payments (about 20 or so) that all
> cleared, and
> got refunded a month later because paypal said that money
> was never
> cleared.  Some of these payments were hundreds of dollars
> some were
> about $45, but all eventually got returned.
> 
> It really isnt hard to do this, and paypal has little
> incentive to
> change this since they dont lose money.  It all has to do
> with one way
> of funding your account (gee there are only 3 ways really).
>  There are
> probably other ways of it looking like money is there when
> it really
> isnt.  At least with an e-check paypal notifies the
> merchant at the
> payment time that the money is pending (so hint this is not
> what I am
> talking about).
> 
> I do not know if disputing with a credit card would prove
> useful,
> although most likely it would and would be more obvious to
> more people
> so its probably the larger way that people would do this
> type of stuff.
> 
> In the end paypal makes the merchant pay for using their
> services and
> its hard to hold the customer accountable.  It generally
> becomes a civil
> suit for failure to pay in a situation like that (getting a
> criminal
> investigation over stuff like that is generally hard at
> least in the US)
> which means that the merchant again would have to bear the
> costs of
> locating and serving the defendant, and they would not be
> able to do
> anything cross border, blah blah blah.  Cant imagine why so
> many
> criminals use paypal.
> 
> 
> > 
> -- 
> Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com     Bret McDanel
> Belfast +44 28 9099 6461        US +1 516 687 5200
> http://www.trxtel.com the phone company that pays you!
> 
> 
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