This article features tips on how to avoid PayPal invoice scams and protect your money from being stolen by scammers.
PayPal is one of the most well-known online payment services, and its ease of use and security makes it a popular choice among individuals, small businesses, and even large corporations as well. Due to this popularity, scams involving PayPal invoices are becoming more and more common. If you aren’t careful, you could end up losing hundreds or even thousands of dollars to these scams, sometimes without even knowing it until it’s too late.
In this article, we’ll go over the ways these scams work, how to spot them before they happen, and how to avoid them entirely so that you can continue safely using PayPal for all your online transactions and purchases.
How does the PayPal invoice scam work?
The PayPal invoice scam is a new one scammers invented to rip off unsuspecting victims. Individuals who regularly handle invoices as a part of their job are more likely to fall for this scam.Below is how the PayPal invoice scam works.
The fraudsters create PayPal invoices and send them mostly in the form of emails to their target victims. And because these scammers usually impersonate reputable companies and organisations in their emails, the victims falls for these emails thinking they are real.
If the recipient of the fake invoice goes ahead and click on any link on that email, they risk having their identity stolen. And should they go even further to acknowledge the invoice and pay with their PayPal account, the money goes directly to the scammers, and most of the time, it is irrecoverable.
How to avoid PayPal invoice scams
If you receive an email with an invoice, but can’t seem to be able to link it to any purchase or work order, take your time and get to the root of it. If the invoice is supposedly from a company or organisation, search for that organisation’s contact details online and verify their claims. Do not respond or click on any link in that email while it is still unverified.
Go to your PayPal account (again, do not use the links in the email!) and check your purchase history to verify that you haven’t been billed fraudulently.
If you were billed fraudulently, immediately go to the PayPal’s Resolution Center and file a case for fraud.
What do you do if you were a victim of the PayPal invoice scam?
While recovering your money may be hard, you still need to take the chance and file a dispute with PayPal for fraudulent billing:
- Go to PayPal’s Resolution Center at paypal.com/disputes/
- Click Report a Problem
- Scroll through your list of transactions until you spot the fraudulent invoice. Click the white bubble next to the listing and click “Continue” in the bottom-right corner
Follow the instructions promptly to complete your dispute
