Recently, world has seen an explosion of these types of scams

what they do it that they send you an invoice email on your paypal account making you think you paid a large amount of money (when you obviously didn't)
I received one a few days ago :

the trick is that in the text message of the invoice, the scammers wrote :
"Dear Customer, You sent a payment of $479. 00 USD to Geeksquad corporation. If you did not make this payment or to cancel this transaction , please call our Help Desk number: +1 (888) 866-****. Cancellation after 48 hours from this email won't be valid for a refund. Have a great day! PayPal® Help Desk +1 (888) 866-****"

they state that a payment has been made, but if you look in your paypal history, there is only an invoice that you CAN pay, it's not been paid from your account ! very clever

then they expect users to phone their line to cancel the order of course. And now you're in their world.

the phone connects your to a calll center in India most of the time (but you don't know that, they say they're in the USA). To get a refund they will lead you through very ingenuous steps to get them to pay them a lot of money :

1) first they ask you to download a remote acces software like TeamViewer or Anydesk (NEVER DO THAT : it gives them access to your entire PC !!)
2) they make you fill a bogus refund form
3) they ask you to log it to your bank to verify the refund has been made. Then at this moment they "black out" your screen (remote software has this "feature" *sigh*) and then will edit the HTML code to make you think you entered the wrong refund amount. Instead of refunding $200 they add zeros when you type the refund amount in that phony refund form. So now the customer thinks he entered a wrong amount and now Paypal (or whatever other corporation like Geeksquad, Norton, etc) sent them $20,000 instead of $200. The guy on the line then says that he's gonna lose his job, or even that the customer can go to jail if he doesn't refund the money.

then they make them go to their bank, withdraw the $20,000 and send it in a shoebox (*sigh* again) to a drop address where someone else will collect the package on behalf of the Indian scammers. Then it's too late to do anything and your money is gone !!
very clever scam.

of course they target primarily the elderly who are not tech savvy. One old women killled herself after all her money had been stolen recently
Damn those guys are wicked.

please pass this informative message to your parents and your grand parents, thanks

list of good scam baiters to educate you and your grand parents:
https://www.youtube.com/@DEYOCLUB
https://www.youtube.com/@ScammerPayback
https://www.youtube.com/@RinoaPoison
https://www.youtube.com/@TrilogyMedia
https://www.youtube.com/@JimBrowning

Jeff

Wow, I've heard about a lot of scams but I didn't know about this one exactly. I also don't use Paypal often, so that may be why. I had someone try to scam me on Zelle recently and a few times before. Good to see these scams being called out, hopefully if will help someone.

Well, there are plenty of scams around. Even just locally on ones cell phone. Call centers are trying to trick you into actions and plunder your account within minutes. I have restricted my interaction to people I know and the rest gets deleted without taking those calls or opening messages.
Imagine when everything goes digital.

One suggestion to protect yourself may help. Never use your savings account for money transfers and online payments in particular. Maintain a separate one and just keep as much funds there is needed. Even my credit card has no access to any of my accounts. I pay them when payments are due.
Paypal has turned into total mess and does not seem to know what they are doing anymore. I have deleted the account. They know from my data that I'm an expatriate but still ask me to provide local citizenship to be able to use my account.

RplusT wrote: Thu Dec 22, 2022 1:30 pm Well, there are plenty of scams around. Even just locally on ones cell phone. Call centers are trying to trick you into actions and plunder your account within minutes. I have restricted my interaction to people I know and the rest gets deleted without taking those calls or opening messages.
Imagine when everything goes digital.

One suggestion to protect yourself may help. Never use your savings account for money transfers and online payments in particular. Maintain a separate one and just keep as much funds there is needed. Even my credit card has no access to any of my accounts. I pay them when payments are due.
Paypal has turned into total mess and does not seem to know what they are doing anymore. I have deleted the account. They know from my data that I'm an expatriate but still ask me to provide local citizenship to be able to use my account.

I NEVER answer an unkown number on my phone. If it's important, they will leave a message... then I can call them back and store their number as safe for next time.

that's how I do it.

otherwise it's scam upon scam upon scam...non stop