| PayPal is the pinnacle of stupidity. I've sold the same digital product many thousand times, and this has happened multiple times: Some customers decides to try to get it for free by paying and then creating a PayPal claim by lying that someone else made the purchases or that it was not delivered. And this usually works, and people tell others, so more people abuse it. Basically every single time someone tries to commit "friendly fraud" as the card networks calls and it(customer tries to scam seller by lying), there are a handful of transactions from one person. PayPal usually rules 90 % of the cases in favor of the buyer. However, there can be 20 purchases during just a couple of hours from one person and card, and somehow PayPal is certain that purchase 6 and 10 was legit, while the rest was someone who used the card without permission. That seems probable, right? Even on a account with a flawless record for over 10 years I've had this happen so many times. Usually when this happens I have to spend hours on this and contact PayPal by phone to get the money back. Usually the customer gets the money too, for some absurd reason. PayPal's fraud system is absolutely garbage, and so is the standard email support. Contacting account managers at least gives you what seems to be a human response. I too got my PayPal account limited in 2012 as a result of a scammer who abused PayPal disputes. The solution is super simple: make buyers pay to create PayPal claims and use the money to have real people quickly look over the cases. This is similar to how cases are handled for card networks. Was the claim legit? Money back, including the claim fee. The merchant has to pay a fee, same way as today. Was the claim not legit? Basically free money for PayPal, and some should probably be shared with the merchant for helping out with solving the fake claim. At least in europe the scams on PayPal has mostly shifted from "unauthorized use" to "not delivered" as a result of strong consumer authentication. |
In the last year I had multiple cases of people contacting me out of the blue and asking if I could draw a picture of their nephew's favourite dog (it is always a dog, and it is always for their nephew whose birthday is coming soon so there is an implicit sense of urgency).
I never actually pursued this stuff because it was obviously a scam of some kind (I draw mostly nudes, dogs or animals in general amount to less than 1% of my production so far, so someone starting their message with "I just adore your style can you please draw a dog for me..." is obviously either a scammer or blind).
Another clear sign is that they are obviously following a script (my standard answer is something alongside the lines of "Gee, thanks, but I do not really work on commissions, and I don't draw animals anyway" to which they would infallibly answer "Fantastic, would 2500USD be ok for you?" - at this point I just block them).
But I am still a bit confused about what the angle would be for this type of scams: assuming they send me 100$ and then open a claim against me because I did not deliver... at most they would get 100$ back after a few days. There is no actual profit, right? (I am considering one of my drawings basically worthless, I draw on paper, usually a5 or smaller).
Is this a laundering schema? What would they get out of it? (There are also lots of people asking to buy my stuff for NFT, I did not fall for that, either, but some other artist on IG explained to me that usually they ask you to create an account on some third party site... the account requires a fee, and after you have paid for it the NFT guy will just disappear - so in that case the way they get money from you is clear... but I still don't get how it would work in case of a physical item).
Any clues?