Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2007 05:03:59 +0200
From: "GerX Man" <geremangere@gmail.com>
To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: transfer statusHi. This is a very serious business, so, relax into your chair and listen. Do you here something? No. Of course you don't. Or, if you do, close your window and read carefully. You want money. So do I. I will send you money through paypal but each time you will receive an ammount from me you will have to send me back half. Let me know if we have a deal. Now I'm sure you can hear something. The money sound. To see that I'm serious I will send you right now $50 into your account. This time you won't have to send me back half. You can do whatever you want. You can geld your dog, cat, (if you have one), you can buy some crack (if you're narcotic), you can buy a Hustler magazine (if you're obsessed)... it doesn't matter. I will wait for your email.
And then, lo and behold, I did indeed receive a $US50 PayPal donation, followed by another separate message from, uh, GerX.
The payment, however, was not from GerX, at least as far as I can see. It was from one "Alba Lugo", who has an AOL e-mail account.
Clearly, Alba Lugo and GerX are the same person, and this is all perfectly above board, and I should go along with it and become wealthy. What could possibly go wrong?!
(I've refunded the payment.)
PayPal seem to provide no way for me to complain about this. You can drill down in their Security section to a place where you can complain about fraudulent transactions made on your own account, but there doesn't seem to be a way to complain about scam artists sending you money from other people's accounts in the expectation that you'll send money back to their accounts and... oh, my head hurts.
(If I try entering the transaction number in the complain-about-a-fraudulent-transaction-on-your-account box, I get an error, because it's not a payment that I sent.)
5 February 2007 at 2:05 am
Seems like the fraudulent part here would be that all of the inbound payments would bounce and you'd just be out the 50% you sent out.
5 February 2007 at 2:57 am
Yeah, and you'd probably also be out the penalties PayPal charges you for "fraud" - which is what you're assumed to have committed if someone sends you money for nothing and then files a complaint saying you didn't send them the thing they didn't actually buy from you.
(That's only happened to me once, but it was still annoying.)
And if your account then got frozen, you might well not, yourself, be able to file complaints about the dude you sent the money on to. It's not as if you could plausibly claim you thought it was a perfectly sensible business deal, after all.
5 February 2007 at 8:49 am
More importantly, which would you choose; an animal gelding, narcotics, or pornography?
5 February 2007 at 10:08 am
Pornography involving the other two options, of course.
5 February 2007 at 3:32 pm
I'd be guessing that this is some form of money mule advert, though surprisingly unsophisticated and unlikely to actually launder funds - weird, eh?.
Gosh, sounds too good to be true! Free Money! gimme gimme gimme!
6 February 2007 at 2:55 am
It's obvious that this is a shady deal. Everyone knows that crack isn't a narcotic. It's a stimulant. That should set off alarm bells, right there.
6 February 2007 at 4:53 am
I've forwarded your post to a private eBay security contact. You will probably be hearing from them soon.