Scammed on PayPal? Here’s How to Avoid Them – Everyone knows PayPal, a service that allows you to pay, send money, accept payments quickly and safely. Thanks to Paypal it is possible to carry out all these operations without having to enter your financial data from time to time, a significant advantage that has rewarded the company with over 250 million registered users worldwide.
However, attempts to scam using this service are very common, whether you are a seller or a buyer. Let’s find out how to avoid scams with Paypal , analyzing everything that could happen on a case-by-case basis.
Scammed on PayPal Here’s How to Avoid Scams
How to avoid all Paypal scams by securing our savings from cyber criminals? Paypal has literally revolutionized the way money is exchanged online, offering an extremely simple and secure way to send and receive money over the internet.
Although PayPal is an extremely serious company and attentive to the safety of its customers, it is certainly not impossible to come across some fraud through PayPal. This can mean many things: successful phishing attempt , fraudulent orders against sellers, unfulfilled orders for customers. Let’s take a look at these cases one by one and find out how to avoid these scam attempts.
The danger of phishing
Phishing is a real danger to anyone who uses the internet. Everyone’s email has been the target of a phishing attempt at least once and often these attempts target people’s PayPal accounts.
To avoid being scammed, you need to open your eyes and understand how to identify fraudulent e-mails. First you need to carefully check the sender’s address, immediately wary of any unusual address, the official PayPal addresses necessarily end, in Italy, with the paypal.it domain.
We must remain calm and not be rushed , almost all fake emails in fact warn the victim of all that his account is in danger, could be blocked or even closed, in case a specific update is not performed. Fraudulent emails contain links that refer to malicious sites.
Therefore, if you have received an email warning you that a critical update must be performed or your account will be closed, if a suspicious email informs you that you have received money, it is always better to close your mailbox and connect from the bar navigation on the paypal.it site, logging in independently. Once on the official PayPal site you can check for yourself.
Other tricks to quickly discover phishing attempts, applicable in general to any similar scam attempt are: pay close attention to typing or grammatical errors , be wary of impersonal greetings (such as “Dear user”).
Finally, you need to pay close attention to attachments: PayPal emails never have attachments, if you have received an email that contains an attachment it is certainly a scam and by opening it you could expose your account to serious dangers.
Seller scams: fraudulent orders
Sellers often have to deal with numerous scam attempts, so it is good to always keep your guard up in case of anomalies in the orders such as those we are going to list.
First of all you need to pay close attention to the shipping address, there are in fact some countries known for fraud attempts, for this purpose it will be enough to search online for a list of high-risk countries and pay more attention in case of orders from those latitudes.
Another alarm bell should sound when you receive an order from a new customer that is above average in terms of amount, for a product in high demand. Fraudulent customers also use a technique to avoid being detected by anti-fraud systems, providing a legitimate address when ordering and asking the seller to change it after payment.
A wise seller would do well to pay attention to international order volume , if they average 2 international orders per month and receive 50 within a few days, chances are something is wrong.
You should also keep an eye on the time of international orders, the possible request for orders from different customers with the same shipping address, the occurrence of several orders from a single PayPal account at the same time, an overpayment by a customer, requests for overnight urgent shipments, suspicious email addresses, questionable shipping addresses.
In all these cases it is advisable to check the customer’s shipping address very carefully, since scammers often use frontmen to whom they deliver the goods and who then in turn send it back to the scammer. The telephone number must also be verified very carefully, creating a telephone list of all customers. In the case of high-risk orders, it is advisable to delay shipments in order to identify a transaction as fraudulent or not.
Read Also: 10 Best PayPal Alternatives for Business in 2023
Buyer scams: secure payment
Even those who use PayPal to make purchases must pay close attention to scam attempts. In fact, it often happens that the goods purchased are completely different from the description provided by the seller or even that they never arrive at the buyer’s destination.
Paypal offers its customers a purchase protection system, in the event that a suitable purchase has been made but the item has not arrived and does not correspond to the description, PayPal will be able to refund the buyer.
Paypal also offers a fraud protection system , all transactions are in fact monitored continuously to avoid identity theft and phishing attempts. All transactions made on Paypal are encrypted with advanced encryption.
The purchase protection system comes into play, for example, if you have purchased one product and another arrives, if you have bought a new item and it arrives used, if you have bought three items but one arrives, if the purchase is damaged in transit, if the item sent is a counterfeit