A couple of weeks ago, I stuffed up and fell for a scam.
It’s been a little stressful to say the least and we are still currently out of pocket by £579.

The good news is that the second lot of £600 that was being taken from our account via Paypal, never actually happened because they realised we already paid the money back and the account balanced itself out.

Yesterday, I received a call from the bank, telling us they had investigated the issue and taken it as far as they can. They are happy that we had nothing to do with the scam and that it wouldn’t affect our account and apparently we were now OK because we weren’t ‘out of pocket’!!

ERM!!! I responded by saying that actually, yes we were out of pocket, by £579. This is where is gets tricky.
I had to explain that we’d had to pay Paypal back the money after they had charged back the money to the original 3 payees when they opened up disputes after realising they had also been scammed. Those people were protected by Paypal.

This changed things a little bit.
The bank said that we shouldn’t have been made to pay that money back because we were victims too. She said we needed to go back to Paypal to get them to investigate and get in touch with our bank directly.

Anyway, Paypal still refused to budge because as everything had been ‘authorised’ by us, and we had withdrawn the funds already, there was nothing they were legally obliged to do, So I got back in touch with Nationwide who promised to send an e-mail to Paypal and send a copy to us in the post. They re-iterated that WE were victims too. We had been victims of what is called ‘an Authorised Pushed Payment Scam’

I later got another call from Nationwide, from a lady called Nicola in the fraud team who was really nice and very efficient. She read what she had sent to Paypal and reiterated that she would be sending it to us in the post also… BUT…. she also had some more news for us. She had also been in touch with the bank attached to the fraudsters account that we had unwittingly sent the money onto. They confirm that partial to full funds are still in that account. This meant that there is still a chance we could get some, if not all of our money back!!

WOOHOO!!

Nicola said that at this point she couldn’t confirm anything. There is still a chance we won’t get anything back, but at least now we have SOME chance at getting something back.

I am feeling a little happier with the situation.
Not happy that it happened.
Not happy that I fell for it in the first place.
Happy that we are now being listened to and have the bank on our side.
Disappointed at the lack of protection from Paypal for this kind of scam.

Lesson learnt….. the hard way!!