PayPal query

Hey guys

I bought a water blast theme deck earlier and got this text message. What shall I do ?

I assume just type 1 and hit enter lol. I don’t know why it would do that though. Maybe their algorithm found something out of character, or maybe he had some recent shady activity on that account.

Yeh that’s what I’m worried about :thinking: if i just authorise or just press 2 and get money back to prevent any issue later on

If you have never gotten that sort of text message before from them, I would DEFINITELY call PayPal first to make sure it was from them. I’ve worked in credit card fraud for a company with national and international cardholders, and let me tell you the one thing that has stuck with me for years after working there - Scam artists, cons, thieves, whatever you want to call them were constantly coming up with new ways to steal other people’s information, identities, etc. in ways that we didn’t even know about. Although it was our specialty to be in the know about those things, and we certainly were, they were always changing their ways to get a step ahead, and vice versa.

I bought a card I thought was legit once online, and I too received an unusual text shortly after. I did more digging and realized the seller was not who I thought they were, so I did not respond, blocked the #, and canceled my purchase. That seller fell off he map when I checked up on them a month later.

I’m also dealing with another fraudulent purchase for 3 cards I made with a seller who had 100% rating and with over 100 reviews. Turns out, over the course of the past several weeks or so, they have been doing nothing but posting pictures of cards, auctioning them, and never sending anything to anyone. And you can see all of the same bad reviews that started popping up out of nowhere at once about a week or 2 ago. How did they get away with all of that without somebody saying something sooner?
Because they are from Australia (or so they say) and they sell internationally. It takes almost 30 days to receive something from Australia. Even if they don’t add tracking info, you have to wait for that time-period to pass before you can really do anything about it. That was plenty of time for them, apparently, to screw over a lot of people who never really thought that selling from the one continent in the world that is also an island and furthest away from the rest of civilization (not counting ANtarctica) could be used to their advantage to commit fraud.

Just saying man, you have to be so careful these days and watch your a**. I’m betting that your text, is probably fine. But listen to me, actually, listen to Gandalf - “Both eyes, whenever I can spare them. Can’t be too careful.” Trust me.

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Maybe I’ll just say i didn’t authorise it to be safe

No, be honest about it to PayPal. Tell them you authorized it (if you truly did), but call them and make sure that that text is from them in the first place. They are the ones who will help you if anything is fraudulent about the purchase.

The issue is NOT with companies and banks doing everything they can to make sure their customers are not liable for fraud. And trust me, lying about the authorization will only make things worse. Depending on the transaction and circumstances, there are simple things that they can research to find out whether or not it was you. And the reason they want to do that in the first place is not to screw you over, so you are shit out of luck. It is simply to discover which company (in a transaction on Ebay for instance the companies would be EBAY and PayPal/your bank) is responsible for refunding you your money.

The goal is to eventually discover what could have been done diffrerently by either company to prevent this from happening. For instance, when credit card chips were not (and still not 100%) available to be used at all merchants yet. You still had to swipe your card even if you had a chip because the merchant did not yet have the machine to run the card via chip Swipe the card captures you card #, less-secure. Using the chip does not- more secure. So this is an example of how our bank would put the liability on a merchant rather than ourselves if a customers card # was stolen through the merchant somehow. Hence, the research into the transaction. Saves the bank millions of $ in the long run. And even though they are not technically the ones refunding their own customers (although they did the work to get it), their customers see it that way and remain happy.

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I think with all of the eBay Horror-Stories floating-around right now, people in-general are more paranoid - I wouldn’t read into that type of text-message to much. However, if you’re looking to get peace-of-mind, just give PayPal a call and they’ll be able to tell you exactly what’s going-on and why you received that text-message.

Personally, I have gotten a few of those text-messages; however, it’s been awhile since I got any. I would get those text-messages if I purchased something from a different computer than usual - when I was in college and purchased something using a school computer. I also received one of those text-messages once when I was purchasing something for a high-dollar figure. I never really looked into it - just said that I had authorized the purchase and everything about the transaction went perfect. I don’t think it’s PayPal linking the Seller to something fishy, but instead PayPal wanting to make sure it was YOU who purchased whatever you purchased and not somebody hacking into your account to purchase whatever. They probably flag “oddities” that occur - using a different computer, purchasing something when you haven’t been active for awhile, purchasing a high-dollar item when that’s not normally like your trends…

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Best thing to do like many have said here is to give paypal a call and see whats up!

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But you did authorise it.

Hmmm

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Yeh I know it’s weird dunno why I’d get that text when I bought it :blush: I’ve left it any way