Consumer complaint received 2022-10-15
Company: Paypal Holdings, Inc
State: WI
Product: Money transfer, virtual currency, or money service
Sub-product: Domestic (US) money transfer
Issue: Fraud or scam

Complaint:
On XX/XX/XXXX, my wife, XXXX XXXX, was scammed by a fake/crooked XXXX XXXX XXXX of PayPal. This was done with the help of XXXX XXXX, which I have already reported. 

Eventually, when we finally reached someone at PayPal by phone on XX/XX/XXXX, the PayPal associate who took XXXX 's call ( she was on hold for 50 minutes ), reported to XXXX, that the fake client, took over XXXX 's phone, and transferred funds in the amount of {$1900.00} to a person named XXXX XXXX. To do this, the fake transferred this money using phone number XXXX. This has been reported to the FBI, and our local Police Department. 

Here are my concerns about PayPal : they sent us an email at XXXX PM, telling us funds were being moved to this person. We were not watching emails then. Why should we? By this time, XXXX had hung up on the fake XXXX support person. Then, we were both trying to work with XXXX XXXX to not process the transaction, because it was already showing up as pending on our XXXX XXXX account. At XXXX XXXX, PayPal sent us an email ( see attachment 2 of 6 ), titled " POTENTIAL UNUSUAL ACTIVITY ON YOUR ACCOUNT ''. It mentions this transaction was basically not consistent with our previous PayPal purchases, and someone may be trying to use our account without our permission. Their emails states further : " DON'T WORRY ''. To keep your account safe, we have temporarily limited some of your account features. It further asks us to logon to our account and secure it. '' I used the blue box titled Logon to PayPal. What I did was change our password. I also reported this transaction was a problem in their app. The PayPal application reported that XXXX XXXX, our charge card provider, had initated an UNATHORIZED TRANSACTION CHARGEBACK,, at XXXX PM, and it was under review ( see attachment ). At this point, I assumed, incorrectly, that both financial institutions, were protecting us on this bogus transaction. There is no phone number associated with any of the PayPal emails, and besides- they don't answer their phones in a timely manner. Next - we received an automated email at XXXX PM titled " AN UPDATE ON YOUR CASE '' ( see attachment ). On it they state they determined there was no unauthorized activity on my case, and they determined it was okay to process this transaction. They also stated they thought it was consistent with our transaction history. Parden me? It was not even close to anything we had done with PayPal before. We had bought XXXX XXXX tickets for a little over {$700.00}, but never anything like this... close to {$2000.00}, and to a stranger? NOTE - their first message on this was at XXXX PM. The next XXXX at XXXX PM. I have managed data centers for many years. This was an AUTOMATED TRANSACTION and message. Normaly an experienced analyst would be looking at this, and require managerial review for a high dollar amount like this. They did not do any research on it at all. At a minimum, we could have been consulted about this transaction. Suspend it until its approved by the sender. Here is where PayPal needs to have some serious changes. Why not send out an email to the purchaser, and give them time to respond about this. For 24 hours. And if my bank has initiated a Chargeback, that should have told them something right there and then. And maybe they need to staff more people for an emergency call in for the many crooks they now seem to have on their application, because its so easy to scam people with PayPal. We went through their dispute process, and of course we were turned down.

Company response to consumer: Closed with monetary relief