A buyer claims that his primary PayPal address is not good, wants me to re-send to diff. email

I accept license payments for my software using PayPal. After a user makes a payment, the software registration information is dispatched automatically by my PHP script in an automated email to the buyer. I use that person's PayPal address to send the registration email to.

This morning, I received a support request from a guy asking to re-send the registration to a different email. He said that the main email associated with his PayPal account is not good. He also sent me a screenshot showing his primary email and then the second email address below it (the one that he wants me to send the registration to.)

So I am wondering, is this a scam?

Can I confirm that the second email he wants me to use is indeed registered with PayPal?

Any suggestions?

 

You might try running this by PayPal support and see if they can provide some answers.

 

If your policy is to only send the key to the address that the payment came from, then inform the customer that you do not make exceptions to that policy.

 

I definitely agree with this. I do think the policy should be clearly stated before the purchase though. You should also be able to see if the original address is confirmed with PayPal.

 

There's too much scam going on with PayPal. For instance, someone steals someone's PayPal account password and starts buying things. In this case if they buy software license from a merchant, they may not have access to the person's email account whose PayPal password they stole, thus they want the merchant to re-send software license to another email address. What usually happens in this case is that the owner of the PayPal account sees their credit card statement at the end of the month, then calls credit card company (Visa or Mastercard) and reports his card as stolen. In turn Visa refunds all the charges. (It literally happened in 100% of my experiences with stolen cards, as a merchant.)

So what happens from a merchant side: say, I send a thief what he bought with a stole card, then, PayPal removes the money from my account (after about several weeks after the purchase was made, which by itself can throw you off balance) and then PayPal imposes a chargeback of about $20 on my account, on top of what they already took out as a full refund+transaction fee for the original payment. So how about that? PayPal definitely doesn't want to lose any money on that.

And that is why I don't want to send the license to some other email address. The easiest resolution is to refund the money right way and block the sender. (In this case all the merchant is losing is a small transaction fee or some cents.)

@JoeSpirit I wish there was an automated way of checking if an email address is registered with PayPal, or even better, if it's verified. It would save me a lot of headache!

What I am asking here is whether or not someone can have a dud primary account at PayPal and then set up a secondary email next to it. Is such thing possible? (By dud, I mean an email that they cannot check mail on.)

PS. As for this particular case, I refunded the payment and told the buyer that I can't forward it. And that was the end of it. (Which kinda tells me that it was probably another scammer.)

 

I know that PayPal does show when accounts are verified. I've seen that in sales I've made. I don't know if PayPal allows dud addresses but I can't imagine them knowingly doing so.

What I would first do in a case like this is send a message to the primary address through PayPal asking if the purchase is valid. That way, if it isn't, the account owner will be aware that his account has been compromised at least.

Beyond that I think you took a smart step in refunding the payment like you did.

 

One line answer:
Paypal does not support intangible products... so whatever is the case you cant fight dispute over intangible products.