LazyMoneyGuy

Low-Effort Takes on Your Finances

Tag: fraud

  • Avoid PayPal and Venmo

    I will never recommend or refer anything I do not stand by.
    All content on this site is to be human written with absolutely no AI generated content.
    I’m not a financial advisor and cannot provide any financial advice.

    Happy Money Monday!

    Today I’m going to write about PayPal and it’s conveniences as well as some of it’s dangerous problems.

    PayPal has several financial services. They have payment processing for online businesses, pay later services (which I’ll discuss another time) money transfers, and even international wiring, invoices

    PayPal.com centralizes most of their services except for notably, Venmo which was acquired but has very similar features to the standard PayPal. Venmo is primarily for money transferring between friends and family, and such though it does have a business structure, such as for landlords and small businesses. The two products are not linked, but rather have different targeted audiences, where Venmo has a more social-media aspect to it, and even links to Facebook if you so choose, while PayPal is more structured for general secure transactions.

    PayPal essentially defined the way we transfer money online, with quick checkout, linking your credit cards and bank accounts to allow for easy and secure payments. If a vendor has PayPal integrated with their checkout screen, you don’t need to enter in your credit card there, just click the PayPal button and you’ll be redirected there to pay. Make sure to stick to legitimate sites for purchases and make sure you are actually paying at PayPal’s website, as scams may try to get your account login with a phishing page.

    Now for the problems…

    Fees are everywhere, where some are avoidable and others are not. If you don’t explicitly send or receive a friends and family “F&F” payment, then the transaction will incur a goods and services fee to the receiver. Additionally, there are fees for converting funds between currencies. Fees for speedy withdrawals of balance to your bank account where they will try to get you to select the instant transfer option.

    Scammers or even just people with grudges can take advantage of these fees and PayPal will do nothing to stop it. One particular scam where people will receive large payments from fraudsters, and then ask for the funds back, hoping you are unaware of this, is known as the “accidental payment scam” these days. They hope you will send the money back as a separate transaction, and then they will contest the first charge with PayPal support. When PayPal or Venmo will reverse the charge because they will side with the “buyer”, they will keep the transaction fee, potentially even putting your account into the negative due to “buyer protection”. On the other hand, if you report the fraudulently received funds to PayPal, they will again, reverse the charge and keep the transaction fee, protecting the scammers and hurting the victims who had no means of preventing the attack except not having an account.

    PayPal has no incentive to actually stop scammers, because they keep the transaction fee from the victims either way as profits. Until regulations require actually helping the victims of these scams instead of the scammers or PayPal, I can’t fully stand by or recommend PayPal or Venmo as services. I personally still have accounts with them, but am heavily considering deleting my accounts or locking it down. Hence, my lack of a referral link on this post at the present.

  • Payment Fraud

    I will never recommend or refer anything I do not stand by.
    All content on this site is to be human written with absolutely no AI generated content.
    I’m not a financial advisor and cannot provide any financial advice.

    Happy Money Monday!

    Today I am bringing up an unfortunate topic. It’s extremely critical to always check your financial statements, such as bank accounts and credit cards for suspicious charges. Often, these charges are small “test” charges at first, which can get around built-in fraud detection from your financial institution. The criminals performing the transactions are hoping that you don’t notice the small amounts and then can eventually perform much larger transactions.

    Many of these attacks begin with a skimming, such as at a gas station pump or Point of Sale system at a vendor. Others, an unsecure or compromised checkout screen on a website. The exact point where payment details are compromised is difficult to determine.

    Using digital wallets and burner cards everywhere you can help prevent these attacks from occurring. However, if you check your statements, such as every month when you pay your bills, you can catch the problems that sneak through before they grow exponentially worse and then can report it to your financial institution.

    This month, I ended up discovering some fraudulent charges on one of my credit cards. I use this card for quarterlies (a topic for another day) so the charges were easy to spot as they were unexpected, and I saw them when I coincidentally opened the mobile app to check on the card for other reasons, but had I not done so, I would still have seen them when checking my statements when it was time to pay bills. The charges were small, subscription charges under ten dollars for a food delivery service in another continent (and even had foreign transaction fees). Immediately as soon as I saw them, I called the fraud line for the credit card and disputed the charges. The credit card issuer locked my credit card, gave a credit for each of the charges, issued me a new account number and mailed out a new card.

    Credit issuers are required to give 60 days from the financial statement containing the fraudulent activities or other errors for you to report it, and then they have 30 days to investigate. Basically, it’s critical to stay vigilant and watch your finances, don’t just pay whatever bills come your way, and don’t let things happen to you. Take steps to prevent fraud from occurring, and if it occurs anyway, don’t push off dealing with the problems either.