Nate Duehr wrote:
> Byron A Jeff wrote:
>   
>> On Fri, Nov 03, 2006 at 11:29:26PM +0100, Wouter van Ooijen wrote:
>>     
>>>> I almost changed the thread title, but decided to "stick with 
>>>> the crowd". (snip story about checks / cheques)
>>>>         
>>> I still think this cheques system is weird: you write on a piece of
>>> paper, which you give to someone else, who takes it to her bank, which
>>> reads it, and forwards the request to your bank, to transfer money to
>>> her bank, at which point your bank might find that you don't have that
>>> amount of money in your account. 
>>>       
>> That's about the gist of it.
>>     
>
> *ALL* monetary systems are based on trust, including cash.  If the 
> "end-users" of the system stop trusting the system, it falls apart (or 
> more likely is re-vamped).
>
> Nate
>   
We just waded thru a paypal fraud. It seems that a fraudster had been 
telling EBay that my wife
sold him a laptop for $1439 and that he never received the goods. No 
such transaction ever happened;
in fact we never owned a laptop. Lois turned in his fraudulent emails 
repeatedly to "spoof@ebay.com".

Then all of a sudden Paypal dinged our paypal account, which fell thru 
to our debit card, for $1439.
We immediately complained, noticing that the spoofer even used his own 
<?> name in the scam. This
happened on Thursday. We complained all day Friday. By Sat night the 
charge was sent back to the
bank. But for 2 days and a weekend, we were on our knees with the bank 
account locked out. It turned
out that Paypal used an old CC# that had been cancelled by the bank<?> 
but the bank honored it anyway.
There was a lot of foot-shuffling at the bank when it realized it made a 
serious error by honoring a card
that was cancelled at the bank a year before.

The funds will be there tomorrow, but this is my LATEST paypal episode.

--Bob
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