eBay fraud

[_Rodders_]

This a new one on me. Expensive item sold and then the sale cancelled but the sellers fees were incorrectly refunded leaving the seller £300k up.

The guy has then transferred it out of PayPal and into his bank account where he's spent it.

BBC News - Man must give back £90,000 after online payment error - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cmwyz2n5xjv0o

Hard to have much sympathy for eBay/PayPal despite being wronged. If the guy was a little smarter he might have got away with it.

How tempted would you have been to put it on Red at the local casino, could you have legitimately kept the winnings doing that while returning the original sum?

[butchstewie]

_Rodders_ said:

Hard to have much sympathy for eBay/PayPal despite being wronged. If the guy was a little smarter he might have got away with it.

Genuinely why?

Reading the article unless I've misunderstood this sounds like straight forward theft.

[SpeckledJim]

_Rodders_ said:

This a new one on me. Expensive item sold and then the sale cancelled but the sellers fees were incorrectly refunded leaving the seller £300k up.

The guy has then transferred it out of PayPal and into his bank account where he's spent it.

BBC News - Man must give back £90,000 after online payment error - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cmwyz2n5xjv0o

Hard to have much sympathy for eBay/PayPal despite being wronged. If the guy was a little smarter he might have got away with it.

How tempted would you have been to put it on Red at the local casino, could you have legitimately kept the winnings doing that while returning the original sum?

Yes you could. But if you'd lost then you're still on the hook for the original money. It's not yours.

[JoshSm]

I doubt the £10m item ever existed, he just spotted a fee refund bug on incomplete sales then forced a big payout by feeding it a big (max?) sale value.

So it was a bit more than an accidental payment from the sound of it, it was deliberate?

[98elise]

butchstewie said:

_Rodders_ said:

Hard to have much sympathy for eBay/PayPal despite being wronged. If the guy was a little smarter he might have got away with it.

Genuinely why?

Reading the article unless I've misunderstood this sounds like straight forward theft.

Agreed. The guy has defrauded a company. The company is a legitimate business and he is a criminal. Even if you don't like the company that doesn't make it any less a crime.

[dundarach]

Hold on...

£300k paid in
12 months in jail

£90k to pay

£210 profit for 12 months inside

And they say crime doesn't pay?

[WCZ]

dundarach said:

Hold on...

£300k paid in
12 months in jail

£90k to pay

£210 profit for 12 months inside

And they say crime doesn't pay?

seems like a good deal unless the £90k is what he spent and he's already repaid the rest

will never have sympathy for ebay though, horrible company

[shtu]

Sounds like that's what has been recovered to date.

Strange fraud though - at that transaction level you can bet there are actual humans monitoring the sales, fees, etc., that's not going to slip through the net for long.

[JQ]

shtu said:

Sounds like that's what has been recovered to date.

Strange fraud though - at that transaction level you can bet there are actual humans monitoring the sales, fees, etc., that's not going to slip through the net for long.

Agreed. Looking at the location of the guilty party, he's not a master criminal running an empire from his Monaco based lair. Doubt he thought that far ahead.

[dundarach]

WCZ said:

dundarach said:

Hold on...

£300k paid in
12 months in jail

£90k to pay

£210 profit for 12 months inside

And they say crime doesn't pay?

seems like a good deal unless the £90k is what he spent and he's already repaid the rest

will never have sympathy for ebay though, horrible company

Ahh yeah that makes more sense!

[Gareth79]

shtu said:

Sounds like that's what has been recovered to date.

Strange fraud though - at that transaction level you can bet there are actual humans monitoring the sales, fees, etc., that's not going to slip through the net for long.

Yeah, I'd have expected any payout over 5 figures to be held for manual checking, at which point somebody would have done a cursory check to see where it came from. Any large payout coming from reversed fees should have sounded alarm bells.

I'm not hugely surprised though. eBay's platform has the feeling of lots of disparate systems running tacked together, some running new software, some running very very old software tarted up and creaking onwards.

[_Rodders_]

butchstewie said:

_Rodders_ said:

Hard to have much sympathy for eBay/PayPal despite being wronged. If the guy was a little smarter he might have got away with it.

Genuinely why?

Reading the article unless I've misunderstood this sounds like straight forward theft.

They're sts. It's a little better now but a mate sold a tool on eBay, guy claimed it didn't work, eBay refunded the guy and tried to take the money back off my mate.

He closed his account straight away and refused to give the money back seeing as he was a perfectly good tool down. I believe they chased the 'debt' to the courts.

It is original article is theft but if they're stupid enough to hand people the money in the first place eventually someone isn't going to care and take the chance.

[WCZ]

_Rodders_ said:

They're sts. It's a little better now but a mate sold a tool on eBay, guy claimed it didn't work, eBay refunded the guy and tried to take the money back off my mate.

He closed his account straight away and refused to give the money back seeing as he was a perfectly good tool down. I believe they chased the 'debt' to the courts.

It is original article is theft but if they're stupid enough to hand people the money in the first place eventually someone isn't going to care and take the chance.

if it was like £2m or something huge then couldnt you just go somewhere (dubai maybe?) where the debt couldnt be chased etc?

[Spare tyre]

dundarach said:

Hold on...

£300k paid in
12 months in jail

£90k to pay

£210 profit for 12 months inside

And they say crime doesn't pay?

Does the taxman want a cut, haha