Tag: paypal

Ivana and The Gumtree PayPal Scam

Ivana and her husband had a car to sell.

They thought they would try Gumtree.  After all, Gumtree is British and it works for local people and especially for large items that the buyer collects.

In the case of a car – no point advertising for more than a short distance from home and it definitely needs to be collected. You can’t put a car in the post box.

The car went on sale but attracted little attention.

Then this arrived

“Great! please consider it sold and remove the adverts online as i am willing to pay your asking price? because i need to buy it for my cousin asap as a surprise gift, i have read through the advert and i’m totally satisfied with it,sadly i would not be able to come personally to collect due to my hearing loss and I’m just recovering from heart surgery so I’m home-bound. can i earn your trust, hope i wont be disappointed? I have a courier agent that would help me to pick it up at your preferred location after you have received your money and cleared to your account and i’ll pay you via PayPal today once you get back to me with your PayPal email and full name. Where is the pick up location so that i can inform the courier agent about it now? Await your response”.

Ivana recognised this is as a well-known scam.

  1. The buyer contacts you via email rather than a phone call
  2. The buyer offers to buy the item immediately, at full price, doesn’t ask any questions and is extremely keen.
  3. The buyer cannot visit to view the item and has a sob story to explain this.
  4. The buyer wants to send a courier ASAP to collect the item
  5. The buyer tries to circumvent paying by Gumtree by offering another method (this means that if you are scammed, Gumtree cannot help)

Quite often these scammers say they will pay by PayPal and you might wonder how someone can scam you if they’ve sent you money on PayPal.

The most common ways are

  1. They don’t pay but instead send fake emails that look like PayPal emails telling you that the money has been paid. Always check your PayPal account rather than accepting an email as proof and never click on links I an email to access your PayPal account.
  2. They pay using a stolen PayPal account. When PayPal find out it’s stolen – you don’t get to keep the money.

With Gumtree, cash payment on collection may be the safest approach.

If you have any experiences with scammers, spammers or time-waster do let me know, by email.

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Are Companies That Only Use Paypal Untrustworthy

When you come across a business that only accepts payment by PayPal, this may be fine or may make you wonder why they cannot accept credit or debit cards. Is it to avoid extra costs and complexity in their business or is there a more shady reason?

A company may choose to only allow payment by Paypal for a variety of reasons, such as :-

  1. They are a single person business and don’t want the complexity of a payment system other than the simplest, which is PayPal
  2. They may only operate on eBay or ETSY or similar auction sites / niche retail sites and not be able to offer other payment options
  3. They are a small business with plans to grow but don’t want the overheads of multiple payments systems until essential
  4. PayPal charges area a lot less than credit card charges.
  5. They are a scam operation and are likely to disappear after taking in customer payments.

Plus, Paypal payments release the money immediately to the retailer whereas payments by credit card take time to be completed.

Many small businesses find it difficult to pay the costs of having a credit/debit card payment system. Also, PayPal was started in conjunction with E-bay, so is well trusted by buyers and holds the money until the buyer verifies the quality and condition of the item.

It is easy to integrate PayPal with most website and a lot of hosting services offer Paypal integration without charge.

Adding a facility for taking card payments does cost – possible $25 – $50 per month from a merchant provider and the banks do often charge more for credit card transactions.

If you want to buy from an online business but are worried by the lack of alternatives payments to PayPal then research the business and check for online of their products and the business and then make your choice.

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Paypal Two Step Verification

Logins and passwords are normal practice to let a valid user identify themselves.

But there are times where this is not a strong enough security and two-factor security adds another layer, thereby making it much more difficult for anyone else to access your account.

Two factor security means that in addition to the password, another security code of some form is needed. In the case of PayPal, that second code is a pin number sent to your mobile phone.

For anyone to access your PayPal account they would need both your password and your mobile phone.

Two factor security is available on many online services and banks e.g. Facebook. Google, Apple etc. We’re using PayPal as an example.

How to Setup 2 Factor Security in PayPal

PayPal call this Security Key.

  1. Log into your PayPal account.
  2. If your mobile phone number has already been verified by PayPal then that step is complete, otherwise you will need to key in your mobile number and verify it for PayPal. This is done through the Account page off the Profile and Settings menu
  3. To activate PayPal Security Key go to Profile – Profile and Settings – Account Settings – Security and you can start the process.

Once completed, you will always need that phone when you want to access PayPal but you will be more secure.

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Paypal Security Warnings

The title of the email is “Important Update: Upgrade Your Browser”

The message starts with a warning in large letters.

Action required to continue accessing PayPal.co.uk.

This could easily be a scammer’s email trying to get you to click on a link supposedly to PayPal but in fact to a scammer’s page.

However, these warnings are real. The email is from PayPal and the links are to PayPal pages.

Why the warning?

There is a standard called “The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)” and it is an information security standard for organizations that handle credit cards from the major card schemes.

They have upped their security requirements from 30th June 2018 and payment takers including PayPal want to meet that new standard.

The message from PayPal says upgrade your browser but you have to click to get more detailed information on what needs to be changed.

PayPal want to ensure everyone using PayPal in the UK uses TLS 1.1 or better still TLS 1.2 rather than the original TLS 1.0 in their browser. TLS is about how the data is encrypted.

How to Upgrade

This is different for each browser but for Chrome means going to Settings then System then Advanced then finding TLS on the list and ensuring only TLS 1.2 is enabled and TLS 1.0 is off.

The PayPal messages contain links for detailed information on each browser.

How to Check Your PayPal Email is Genuine

Scammers will notice these emails going out from PayPal and likely try to replicate them but with links to their own fake pages.

  1. Check the email is from PayPal.co.uk and not any other domain
  2. Check the links do go to PayPal pages (hover the cursor over the link to see where it will go)
  3. You don’t need to login to anything to make the changes as it’s just the browser settings you will change.
  4. Do I have to follow PayPal’s instructions? Only if you want to keep using PayPal payments.

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