Many suspicious payment transactions with hotmail.com emails from Spain

[AntibodySW]

I sell a software product online. Since the end of September I've received over 100 purchases from people residing in Spain with hotmail.com email addresses. The hotmail addresses are all 5 or 6 random letters followed by "@hotmail.com" and the country code is always "ES". I only noticed these transactions as I started getting a large number of disputes popping up, some incurring chargeback fees. From our records I can see that none of the purchased software unlock codes have been used. I don't understand why these transactions are occurring as they are not even using the software.

I have worked through all of these transactions and manually refunded each one. I called Paypal about this (just over a week ago) and asked that these suspicious transactions be investigated as I want them to stop. The guy I spoke to assured me that they would be investigated.

This morning I noticed I had 2 more of them pop up which I have now refunded. 

Does anyone have any idea why this might be happening? What is the purpose of these transactions? How do I block them? It seems that there used to be a way to block countries in the past but that option doesn't seem to exist any more. 

Thanks!

[sharpiemarker]

@AntibodySW 

It seems like some kind of random act of mischief/malice meant to cause some financial damage. Look in your block payment settings for options. There is PayPal fraud filters settings in the All Tools page but it appears to just take one back to profile settings. The only other option is to block intl payments: Account Settings > Payment Preferences > Block Payments > Update

[AntibodySW]

Thanks for the reply. Blocking international payments isn't an option for me as I have clients all over the world.

I wish PayPal would give us more control over who can purchase from us. The current "block" settings available are not at all useful to me.

I basically have to check for these dodgy payments every day and manually refund them. I've been using PayPal for over 10 years but I'm now seriously considering switching to an alternate payment processor.