Today is the last article in my series of articles I’m writing about the scams I’ve experienced in my career of selling and buying products and services online. This is the big one guys, by far the biggest loss I ever had, and not only in terms of money.
Read about the other scams I wrote here:
Part 1 – https://onmoneyline.com/selling-online-paypal-and-scams-part-1/
Part 2 – https://onmoneyline.com/selling-online-paypal-and-scams-part-2/
Part 3 – https://onmoneyline.com/selling-online-paypal-and-scams-part-3/
Part 4 – https://onmoneyline.com/selling-online-paypal-and-scams-part-4/
Part 5 – https://onmoneyline.com/selling-online-paypal-and-scams-part-5/
Scam? What happened?
Some time at the beginning of 2019 a guy contacts me on Skype wanting to buy some of my services. Before I continue, when someone contacts you on Skype and talks to you, it immediately puts your mind (at least for me) at ease to an extent as far as scammers go, because most scammers will never talk to you on Skype. In fact, most scammers will try to avoid any contact with you.
After a brief conversation I give the guy my Paypal email, he sends me money and starts buying from me. Over the next month the guy spends $1,080 dollars with me, sending it to me over 6 separate payments. I had some monetary costs to deliver the service for him, and of course I also spent my time working on his orders. There were a few minor glitches, but other than that everything was going smoothly and everything seemed to be fine…
Paypal Chargebacks
At some point the scammer disappears for about 10 days, and then I wake up to 6 Paypal chargebacks, one for each payment he sent me.
Your buyer filed a claim. The buyer stated that they never received the item. Please help us to resolve this issue by logging into your Resolution Center and providing us with any information that can assist us with our investigation.
Your participation is essential to the claims process. If we don’t receive a response from you before 6 April 2019, this case will be closed and decided in your buyer’s favor.
Please understand that until our review is complete, we will hold any funds associated with this transaction.
ANAND SHANKAR has requested a refund of 200,00 USD. If you agree to this request, the case will be closed once the refund has been processed.
He writes a detailed message on each chargeback, lying through his teeth:
ANAND SHANKAR has sent you a message about the payment they made to you on25 January 2019. They have stated that they have not received the item.
If you cannot resolve this problem, you or ANAND SHANKAR can escalate it to a PayPal claim before 16 April 2019. On that date, this case will automatically close. Once a case has been closed, it cannot be reopened or escalated to a PayPal claim. We encourage you to respond to the buyer as soon as possible.
Then he immediately escalates all the chargebacks to claims, so that Paypal will review them:
The buyer has asked to escalate this dispute to a claim.
We will review all messages for this dispute in the Resolution Center and may contact you for more information.
If we ask for more information, you’ll need to respond within the required time frame. If you don’t respond on time, the case may be decided in favor of the buyer.
What happened so far is that he created a chargeback for every payment, wanting to get his money back. He left a message on every chargeback case where he lied, stating that he didn’t received the item, but he also mentioned the link to my website where he was buying the services from me, because he knew that would work in his favor and could get me in trouble, even maybe get my Paypal account suspended. The reason for that is because that specific type of website is not very much liked by Paypal. He knew exactly what to do and what to write, professional scammer confirmed!
And then without giving me the opportunity to respond to his chargebacks, he immediately escalated them to claims, basically asking Paypal to review the payments and decide on what happens to the money. So he didn’t want to talk to me, tell me what the problem is, let me try to fix it, or even issue him a refund if we agree on it. Typical scammer behavior…
Responding to the Paypal claims
In some cases I may just accept a chargeback and send a customer their money back. Like if they have a legitimate problem with my work, or if they buy and there’s an issue with their order and I can’t reach them, or if they just ask me to for whatever reason. But in this case, considering the amount of money at stake, and considering the money and time I spent doing work for this scammer, I decided to fight!
So I responded to all 6 of his chargebacks, providing as much information as I could in regards to the case:
Thank you for providing a response to the claim ANAND SHANKAR filed against you.
We are reviewing the facts of the case and will carefully consider all the material before making a decision. We will let you know if we need additional information from you, and will contact you when a decision has been reached.
Please understand that until our review is complete, we will hold any funds associated with this transaction.
At this point there was not much else I could do except sit back and wait for Paypal to reach their decision. I did try contacting the scammer on Skype, trying to talk to him and try and resolve the problems, but he never replied, because the scam was well underway and he had no reason to talk to me.
I will say that all this stressed me out quite a lot, and I was not feeling great at this time…
Paypal – We’be decided the Case
Literally on the same day, Paypal decides 5 of the chargebacks in the scammer’s favor:
We’ve completed our review of this case and decided in favor of your buyer.
The buyer stated they never received the item, and the proof of delivery details provided could not be verified.
We debited 200,00 USD from your PayPal account to refund your buyer. If this refund has made your balance negative, please log in to your PayPal account and add money to your balance.
So I lost 5 of the chargebacks, and Paypal gave him the money back. But there was one more chargeback, a smaller one for $150 dollars, where for some reason he changed the reason for the case from “Item Not Received” to “Item Defective or Not as Described“:
Your buyer has changed the reason for this case. The buyer stated that the item was defective or not as described. Please be aware that due to consumer protection laws, PayPal cannot guarantee the return of your merchandise if the case is found in favor of the buyer.
If you have any supporting documentation to help us resolve this case, please log in to your PayPal account and send it to us through our Resolution Center within 72 hours. If we don’t receive any additional information from you we will use the information available to us to make our decision.
So a new case was created for this new/changed chargeback:
Your buyer filed a claim. The buyer stated that the item was defective or not as described. Please be aware that due to consumer protection laws, PayPal cannot guarantee the return of your merchandise if the case is found in favor of the buyer. Please help us to resolve this issue by logging into your Resolution Center and providing us with any information that can assist us with our investigation.
Your participation is essential to the claims process. If we don’t receive a response from you before 7 April 2019, this case will be closed and decided in your buyer’s favor.
Please understand that until our review is complete, we will hold any funds associated with this transaction.
ANAND SHANKAR has requested a refund of 150,00 USD. If you agree to this request, the case will be closed once the refund has been processed.
So I responded to the new case, because at this point why not:
Thank you for providing a response to the claim ANAND SHANKAR filed against you.
We are reviewing the facts of the case and will carefully consider all the material before making a decision. We will let you know if we need additional information from you, and will contact you when a decision has been reached.
Please understand that until our review is complete, we will hold any funds associated with this transaction.
And to my surprise, Paypal decided this last case in my favor:
The following case was found in your favor. Any hold on this transaction has been removed.
We have confirmation that the buyer has received the item or service. No further action is required on your part.
So at this point Paypal decided 5 of the cases in his favor, giving him back $930 dollars, and decided 1 case in my favor, allowing me to keep $150 dollars.
Honestly, I have no idea what happened with that one case. Maybe the scammer felt guilty and decided to mark that one case that he did receive the service, or maybe the scammer decided to see what would happen if he changed the reason for a chargeback during the process, so that he can get some insight into how Paypal works and perfect his craft for future scams. Maybe it’s the Paypal employee that reviewed these chargebacks realized I was being scammed and took pity on me, and did something to allow me to keep the money from that one payment.
Whatever the reason, at least keeping that one payment softened the blow a bit, and made my losses because of all this a little bit smaller.
But ask youself; we have 6 identical chargebacks, 6 identical cases, and Paypal in their infinite wisdom decides to rule on 5 of the cases one way, and 1 of the cases differently. It speaks volumes about Paypal and how there’s no consistency and stability with them. They just do whatever they want, caring little about their customers. Were the cases reviewed by a human or some crazy artificial intelligence? Perhaps a monkey? I don’t know.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Paypal truly is the scammer’s paradise!
Insult to injury – We’ve permanently limited your account
Just to add insult to injury, even before this entire process was over, Paypal permanently limited my account and froze all the money I had in it (about $3,000 after the chargebacks were settled) for 180 days, or 6 long months.
If you check the screenshots above, the entire process was over by the 28th of March, and Paypal suspended/banned/limited my account on the 27th of March, as you can see below:
After a recent review of your account activity, we’ve determined you are in violation of PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy. As a result, we’ve permanently limited your account.
Please remove all references to PayPal from your website(s) and/or auction(s). This includes not only removing PayPal as a payment option, but also the PayPal logo and PayPal shopping cart.
Per the User Agreement, when PayPal permanently limits an account due to an Acceptable Use Policy violation, any funds on your account are held for 180 days. After 180 days, if applicable, we’ll contact you with information on how to withdraw any money in your PayPal account.
Should any chargebacks result in your account balance falling below zero, then you’ll also need to settle the amount owed to PayPal to avoid further action.
You can find the complete PayPal Acceptable Use Policy by clicking Legal at the bottom of any PayPal page.
Aside from the fact I just lost almost $1,000 dollars, and the fact I now have $3,000 frozen in a Paypal account for 180 days, not knowing if I’ll ever actually get that money back… on top of all that I had now lost my Paypal account, and my entire business was now in grave danger as I couldn’t accept payments on Paypal from my customers anymore.
It was a bad time…
Scammer Information
Here is all the information I have about this scammer:
His username on my site: smmboost
His email on my site: [email protected]
His Skype email: [email protected]
His Skype: live:fun4u1329
A website that’s probably associated with him: fastlykke.com
His probable name: Ajaib Malhotra
His probable personal email: [email protected]
A ripoff report on him: https://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/ajaib-malhotra-genuinelikescom/-/ajaib-malhotra-genuinelikescom-ajaib-malhotra-asmalhotra44yahoocom-paypal-scammers-inte-1455337
When it was all said and done – 1,5 year later
It’s been a year and a half since this all happened, and today as I’m writing this article I get to reflect back on the situation with a clear head.
You’ll be happy to hear my business today is better than ever. I’m always careful when dealing with new customers, especially ones that just contact me out of nowhere, and especially ones that talk broken English and talk a big game about spending large amounts of money from the get-go.
Another thing this whole situation prompted is a move by me to expand and start using more payment processors, in order to diversify risk. So today I still use Paypal (and hate Paypal), but I also use many other payment processors, such as Payoneer, Transferwise, Perfectmoney, 2checkout, Skrill and others. I also accept a number of cryptocurrencies through Coinpayments.
And regarding the $3,000 dollars Paypal froze on my limited Paypal account for 180 days… they allowed me to withdraw the money after 180 days passed. So at least they didn’t completely destroy me by stealing my money (which, if you read around online, they’ve done that to people too)…
Here is a video I made talking about this:
Conclusion
In conclusion, I am very well aware that Paypal is a necessary evil when doing business on the internet, but guys be very very careful with your Paypal accounts. Paypal doesn’t give two shits about you, your family or your business. Other payment processors either don’t offer the ability to customers to dispute payments and raise chargebacks like that, or they require people to contact the payment processor’s customer support and actually state a case about why they feel they should get their money back. And if they do, the case will actually be investigated by a person and a decision will be made in a fair way.
I’m speaking specifically about a chargeback situation I had on Payoneer once, where a guy tried to scam me out of $100 by receiving a payment from me and never delivering the work I paid for, and so I had to ask for my money back by contacting Payoneer customer support, not knowing if asking for my money back was even possible. But I did it, and I presented my case, and Payoneer actually investigated, correctly and by a real human, and they gave me my money back as I was clearly being scammed. Maybe I’ll write an article about this at some point…
This is why Paypal is a scammer’s paradise, because they make it easy on scammers to scam. That’s why scammers don’t really try to use other payment processors to scam people, as they won’t last very long if they tried, they won’t get very far with it.
Stay safe guys, and make that money!
I know your scammer. He live in punjab
Hey Ankur,
Okay, thank you.
Can I have his information?