Notification of Pending PayPal Payment... and then cancelled 10 days later. Not an eCheque.

[thegaminggamer]

This is a weird one. I had a "buyer" who bought an item and paid by PayPal. However, this was some sort of non-eCheque pending payment. Here's what it looks like in that email:

Dear X,

X has initiated a PayPal payment to you - funded from the sender's bank account - on X X 2017 XX:XX:XX AEST.

If the payment is still pending or the funds are not collected after 30 days, the transaction will be automatically cancelled. The sender can cancel this transaction any time before you collect the funds.

If I check this pending payment in my PayPal account, PayPal advises me not to post the item until it clears. However, there was no "please wait x days for payment to clear" text. And if I remember correctly, there was no link I could click on to "collect" the funds. My memory could be wrong which is why I'm double-checking here. Anyway, 9 or 10 days later, I get an email from PayPal saying it was cancelled:

Status: Cancelled
Your pending PayPal payment from X could not be successfully completed. The amount was not credited to your PayPal account. Please do not ship your item.

Reason: This payment was automatically returned by PayPal on X X 2017 because the funds were unclaimed for 30 days.

Obviously, this must be some sort of auto-generated message because not even 10 days had passed. I wasn't even given the opportunity to claim the "unclaimed" funds in the first place.

So unless the buyer decides to try paying again, that was a sale lost. But since the beginning, there were multiple red flags:

1) The buyer had 1 digit positive feedback.

2) The buyer was from a South American country.

3) After the buyer made the pending payment, they sent me an email with broken English saying something like "send the item and then my bank will release the funds to you. Also, I want to give this item urgently to my son". 

4) Their eBay ID, name registered with PayPal, and the name on their shipping address all had 3 different Spanish names.

5) I had no other communication from the so called buyer.

I'm guessing this was a small fish scammer counting on sellers to ship first.

Anyone else had this kind of pending PayPal payment?

[*tippy*toes*]

Yes, scammer. You were lucky, you dodged a bullet. Make sure you add them to your blocked list,

[kopenhagen5]

Could also have been a hijacked eBay account and they are phishing for PayPal email addresses which they now have.

So I hope your PayPal password is a secure one and not something like your DOB or related to name, eBay ID etc.

[thegaminggamer]

I seem to have miscommunicated my intention of this post. It's not so much the deadbeat bidder I'm concerned but this type of payment which I have never received before. Could anyone clarify the technicals behind it? As I said, most "pending payments" are eCheques that have a specified clearing date (e.g. 7 days), but not this time.