Stay-at-home PayPal crook used stolen funds to buy gold bullion A computer crook who swindled eBay customers out of more than £185,000 has been jailed for three-and-a-half years. Richard Kirk, 22, and from the Sherwood area of Nottingham, raided the PayPal accounts of 303 eBay users, transferring the money to accounts under his control. He used the stolen funds to buy a variety of goods, …
So he stole an average of 600 pounds from over 300 paypal accounts, before one of the victims thought to call the police to report a theft? That seems unlikely somehow. What's the bets that following Paypal's internal dispute service gave all his victims the runaround for months on end, before the police finally got involved? Isn't exactly rocket science to ask the bank of the destination account for the name and address of the account holder, then turn up in a squad car, is it...
That song/and dance seems to work pretty well even with scams through credit cards. My wife - allegedly at least - inadvertently signed up for one of those deals. A friend got hit with one a few years prior as well. The ones I've seen typically claimed to be either group buying clubs or credit monitoring services, all with a smallish recurring monthly fee. As they were what I'd call gray-area scams - i.e. ones that wanted to stay in business and not get thrown into jail - they were not too difficult to put a stop to the payments, but trying to get your money back for prior charges was not for the faint of heart. After all, a "service" of some sort was allegedly rendered :/
Not trying to defend Paypal or the credit card companies for any of this, but I'd imagine it's pretty difficult for them to tell the real scams from the borderline legal scams.
I would not call Experian "small scam".
They decided to pass on a 45K mortgage filed vs my credit record. Granted, it was me financing the house extension, but if their service was what it claims to be they should have notified me about this change to my credit record.
So I promptly cancelled the "monitoring" immediately after that.
"So he stole an average of 600 pounds from over 300 paypal accounts, before one of the victims thought to call the police to report a theft?"
Have you ever tried to report a credit/debit card fraud to the police (in the UK) which does not involve the physical card being stolen and then used?
I suggest you try it.
They will refuse POINT-BLANK to deal with it and nothing you can do will make them do otherwise.
You will not get a crime number. You are entirely on your own - other than the card issuer who will usually proceed on the assumption that you're lying.
I ordered something on ebay, and paid by paypal, but it was never delivered to my address. Perhaps that is why Paypal completely ignored me?
Paypal also ignored any requests for the "bank details" of the perp that they claim are used to check that the non-existant address they had for him was actaully correct.
However Barclaycard came to the rescue and slapped Paypal :)
Yes, you can bet the other 302 people who had funds taken from their PayPal accounts were given the right royal runaround by PayPal before the 303rd person finally broke through PayPal's most unprofessional and disingenuous user agreement and non existent customer service.
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