Interesting scam attempt?

[Arbre]

We got a couple of orders through recently. Both were relatively high value orders (hundreds of pounds) to the same person.

There were two PayPal payments, each one including the corresponding correct Actinic order number as the Item Title, Item Number and Invoice ID. The payments had successfully gone through the PayPal system itself- however, they were only for 1p each!

It's pretty clear that this was an attempted fraud and not an honest mistake or fault on our part nor theirs. Both orders were for multiple items obviously chosen for their high value (one was four £93 graphics cards, the other was for multiple duplicators, computers, Vista upgrades- another giveaway, who's upgrading to Vista now Windows 7's out- etc.) This screamed "fraud" as we're primarily a seller of consumables and virtually all our orders are for low-value items; we rarely see even one item that expensive in legitimate orders.

As soon as I heard about this, I thought "sneaky *******s", as I twigged what they were probably trying to do- make it seem like payment for the orders had been successfully received so that we'd ship them without paying attention.

Fortunately, Actinic itself hadn't registered the payment as successful and the transactions were still sitting in the "failed payment" section.

According to my boss, you can't manually associate an order number with a transaction in PayPal, but though I don't normally deal with that side of things myself, I'm sure there must be an alternate route that lets you do that?

Anyway, yeah- blatant fraud attempt. Anyone else seen this?

- Arbre

[malbro]

We got a couple of orders through recently. Both were relatively high value orders (hundreds of pounds) to the same person.

There were two PayPal payments, each one including the corresponding correct Actinic order number as the Item Title, Item Number and Invoice ID. The payments had successfully gone through the PayPal system itself- however, they were only for 1p each!

It's pretty clear that this was a scam attempt and not an honest mistake or fault on our part nor theirs. Both orders were for multiple items obviously chosen for their high value (one was four £93 graphics cards, the other was for multiple duplicators, computers, Vista upgrades- another giveaway, who's upgrading to Vista now Windows 7's out- etc.) This screamed "fraud" as we're primarily a seller of consumables and virtually all our orders are for low-value items; we rarely see even one item that expensive in legitimate orders.

As soon as I heard about this, I thought "sneaky *******s", as I twigged what they were probably trying to do- make it seem like payment for the orders had been successfully received so that we'd ship them without paying attention.

Fortunately, Actinic itself hadn't registered the payment as successful and the transactions were still sitting in the "failed payment" section.

According to my boss, you can't manually associate an order number with a transaction in PayPal, but though I don't normally deal with that side of things myself, I'm sure there must be an alternate route that lets you do that?

Anyway, yeah- blatant scam attempt. Anyone else seen this?

- Arbre

I recall Grabriel Crowe posting how this could be done some time back, I doubt if the post is still on the forum as he explained how it could be done.

first time I have heard of it happening though.

[Mike Hughes]

Best not to discuss the details on the forum but in general I believe it's done by spoofing the call to paypal.

IIRC the paypal callback cannot be intercepted so a 1p payment will never tally within actinic and these kind of fraudulent orders will never appear as 'paid'.

Mike

[Darren B]

yep gabe highlighted this but the post was removed, apparently this could not be fixed easily as actinic does not check the amount paid against the order value, just the call back shows paid.

so it shows as fully paid from my understanding and not partial payment