Instagram and Paypal scam
This Scam cost us $10.
Not because we didn’t realize it was a scam, but only because the situation had become so funny and absurd that we wanted to see how it would end.
Let’s start from the beginning. Like many of you, I have an account on instagram where I rarely post content that makes me and my friends laugh. It is a very normal account that has very few followers and i know all ot them.
I get a message from a stranger who wants to buy pictures of my feet from me. For the incredible sum of $1,500. I am a boy but he thinks I am a girl and I can also understand the kink but the amount is too high. Curiosity was stronger than me and I let him write.
Our friend, let’s call him by his nickname Randy, convinces me that he is a serious buyer and wants to pay immediately, despite me buying time by promising him photos and payment a few days later.
He starts insisting that he wants my paypal address, after a couple of hours I show him my address and Randy sends me a screenshot of Paypal where there is a money transfer of $1500. The strange thing is that underneathm there is a note where it says that I, the recipient, have to pay a $10 fee to receive the money.
The screen is clearly an edited screenshot of a real money transfer, not yet formalized, with the fee part added.
I start asking more about the fee only to see the scammer’s reaction. Our friend Randy began storming me with messages, telling me that now that I had the money in the account I was no longer responding and that I was the scammer. The fee , according to him, was motivated by the fact that he had a business account and, because of this fact, Paypal worked this way. And this was not true.
Plus The push to me to pay the $10 was very strong. Here we have another element to pay attention to.
After a while I decide to send him this $10, obviously knowing I’m going to throw it away. I send the $10, as Randy tells me, with the “send to a friend” solution (so without the possibility of being able to get it back) and he asks me for a screenshot.
Randy disappears for half an hour, probably he moves the $10 into another account, and in the meantime he prepares another screenshot for me. In fact, after a short time I get another screenshot of the payment but now with another 25 dollar fee.
It becomes apparent that the vicious cycle becomes unstoppable, and that the payment fees will rise in value exponentially. That said, I declined payment and Randy in despair accused me of trying to make him lose his $1500. Another impossible thing, since if the money was in the Paypal loop, it would go back to the sending party.
That said, I ended it all by thanking Randy for the lesson and the fun.
To recap, as you can see, this scam is based on ignorance of how Paypal works, absurd excuses, and the haste and pressure created by the scammer on the victim. If you have used Paypal you know that any fees are charged to the payer, not the recipient. Just the initial situation alone was so absurd that it could only be a scam.
The next day we got the exact same scam again, from another user who always wanted to buy pictures of my feet (I still don’t understand why). The pattern was the same, the only difference being that in this case the payment fee was justified by the fact that the paypal account was in cryptocurrency and not USD.
This is all fantastic
