"An unauthorized account activity claim"

[Melicalol]

Recently, PayPal received a notification from a user regarding unauthorized access to his PayPal account. As a result, one of the payments credited to your PayPal account has been placed in a temporary hold while we investigate the claim.  PayPal constantly monitors transactions for unauthorized use of accounts in order to maintain the safety of our users.

The details of this transaction are as follows:


Transaction Date: Jun 10, 2012
Transaction Amount: $90.00 USD

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I have sold Digital goods, Diablo 3 gold via paypal.  I have skype log of the transaction, Screenshots of the trade, and I even have the players gametag. The thing is, there is an easy way to scam legitimate by simply doing the  "An unauthorized account activity claim"

https://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5589545884?page=1

This here is a thread about people being scammed by Paypal users who create multiple Paypal accounts and bipass trades by saying "An unauthorized account activity claim".

I sold to this person twice for $90. So that is $180 of my digital worth gold. He simply spams "An unauthorized account activity claim". claims to paypal and my Paypal money is held by Paypal. I Currently sent my source of the sales, but I don't think Paypal investigators will even look at it. So here are screenshots of my Paypal trades, as you can see I have never had my money held before. So please Paypal forum readers, check into this. Scammers are getting away with it using your own company to do it. My trades give paypal % cut so I am under the Digital goods sellers protection. Please do something about this.

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[Melicalol]

here is my second paypal account, I have been selling to people via paypal and I have been fair and legitimate. Can someone on the forum please respond and help me with my "An unauthorized account activity claim was recently filed against the following transaction. "  Paypal really needs to protect sellers from scammers. I have read Paypal rules, and it says there is no Buyer protection on DIGITAL goods, infact it is disapprove of doing it. This buyer did it Via PERSONAL GIFT. Then he filed for unauthorized account activity so he can scam my Digital goods while asking for his money to be refunded.

[Lightspeeda]

Hey there, sorry to hear of the mess you're in at the moment. 😞

I help run a virtualware business where we sell online game items, so I've had a decent amount of experience in dealing with frauds and chargebackers. As far as I know, officially, Paypal protects neither buyer OR seller when it comes to transactions involving intangible goods.

Your ability to win this is going to depend on two factors: 1. The saviness of the scammer and 2. The amount of investigative effort Paypal puts into the case. When someone makes an unauthorized transaction claim, they are claiming that their account was compromised and that someone else got into it illegitimately. The screenshots of the transaction probably aren't going to help you (unless they contain personal identifying information that only the real Paypal account holder would know), because they're not claiming they didn't get the goods; they're claiming that the person who bought those items from you wasn't them!

*removed by poster request*

The best move you can do on your part is to make sure PayPal does the investigative legwork they need to do on your case. If that account was *actually* compromised, they need to treat it very seriously and make every effort to locate and prosecute the person responsible for stealing that Paypal user's identity. If the account *wasn't* compromised, they also need to take it very seriously, as you have a user of their system fraudulently claiming their account was compromised in order to steal from others without consequence. Either way, there's fraud going on, and you should take every effort necessary to ensure you're informed of the results of their investigation.

Best of luck to you in this matter!

[ch1pn3ss]

@ Lightspeeda: Perhaps it would be wise to redact a few pieces of information in your post since this is a publicly searchable forum...

@OP: That really stinks, sorry to hear it. But there is now hope! Blizzard will now graciously allow you to do your business through them, for a meager 30% (15% transactional, 15% "paypal deposit") fee, of course. 

[Lightspeeda]

Ah,  unfortunately as it's been over a day I can't edit the post; it was a bit dumb of me to discuss such a thing publicly. All the same, sometimes it does help in preventing fraud if you know a bit more about the IP they're coming from. If someone makes an order in the states and has an IP coming from, say, Ethiopia, you can generally assume that something funny is going on.

If any admin would be kind enough to filter out the more compromising bits of my first post in this thread, you'd have my gratitude.

[PayPal_Frank]

Hi everyone,

As Lightspeeda stated there is no guarantee of protection for buyers or sellers when it comes to intangible goods.  Selling digital goods can be a very rewarding business model but there is also a higher probability for unauthorized payments and chargebacks.  We have more information about this in the Digital Goods Fraud Prevention Guide.

While other companies may primarily use IP addresses to investigate fraud, I can assure you that we use many different factors when doing our investigations.  We don't divulge those processes or how the security system works to ensure the safety of the entire PayPal community.  We take these investigations very seriously and our fraud review teams will not award an unauthorized payment investigation if we have evidence that indicates the payment was really authorized.

ch1pn3ss also mentioned that Blizzard facilitates real money virtual item purchases now through their Diablo III auction house. As Blizzard states on their website, they are using their Battle.net Authenticator and SMS Protect features to help prevent unauthorized use.  Those features combined with other limits and policies can definitely help to reduce the risks.

Most payments are processed without any issue and unauthorized payments are relatively rare.  With that said, I know it can be pretty scary when a payment is reversed.  Hopefully this is the only time something like this happens.

- Frank