![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutFirst, I’m going to tell you the simple rules I learned for how to not make the mistake I made on Dec 29, 2025. After that, I’ll tell you the back story.
If you are searching for something on google and struggling to find it, and you land on a website you are not familiar with that appears to have what you are looking for for cheap, and you are thinking, what the heck, it’s not that much money, what’s the worst that can happen take the following steps.
First: is the URL a weird, meaning-free set of letters? This website may be a partial clone of a real website, that has been seeded with something that is an AI generated listing matching your search terms. So the website might look very high quality, have no ads, etc., and may even be a vaguely recognizable brand you’ve never personally shopped at — but that URL doesn’t make sense.
Second: if you are using PayPal, and you have both a bank account / debit card AND a credit card attached to your PayPal, but PayPal is only showing you the bank account / debit card as an option, that’s because you are doing a bank transfer to the other person. You are basically sending money as if through zelle or Venmo or similar bank transfer and that can wind up overseas and unrecoverable very quickly.
Third: pay super close attention as you move through the PayPal payment screens, because the low dollar amount that caused you to decide to try this weird website may switch to something substantially larger.
Any of these three things should have caused me to stop and avoid this scam, but I was jetlagged and having fun shopping online. I actually showed this to Roland, and he, too, was like, eh, it’s $40, might as well take a flier on it. I did not consciously attend to these three things, and I certainly didn’t interpret them correctly. I saw a very professional looking website that was well-populated (Vinnie’s, an Australian website for St. Vincent de Paul). I noticed it had a weird URL, but I’ve seen some really odd URLs on legit websites. I will not accept an odd URL without further investigation ever again. I also couldn’t find a search box, which was odd, but didn’t trigger immediate suspicion. IT SHOULD HAVE. A partial clone of a website will typically remove almost all functionality that is not text / photos / links. It’s a funnel to a payment screen to try to get you to send money via PayPal or give them your credit card information.
So, here’s the story.
I’d gotten through a ton of tasks during the day, and I was tired and not interested in doing any more work. I’d had an idea that sounded like do-able, but hard to find, which is my favorite kind of shopping, because if I find something right away, the fun is over. I AM GOING TO GET A BETTER HOBBY. I’ll probably go back to lego and podcasts. I was not drinking. It was not late for me (I’d recently returned from California, and it was 8:30 pm eastern time).
I’m shopping for my hard to find item, which is a bead necklace. I’ve established I want 10 mm beads, ideally purple corundum. I could back down to amethyst, but the corundum means I don’t have to take care of this item at all; it will be largely impervious to damage. I want individual knots between the beads, and I want it to be about 30” long, but I could go longer or slightly shorter. Basically, just shy of opera length. I’ve already looked at a bunch of the other purple stones and concluded — as I always do — that they are too soft and/or prone to chipping / cracking. I’m happy with synthetic / lab grown, and I have found an etsy seller who will sell individual 10 mm purple corundum (with stars!) beads, but they are $26.90 each, and at that length, that’s enough money to give me pause. (This is likely what I will end up doing, and honestly, it’s about the amount of money the scammer is trying to extract from me, which we will get to shortly.) I try AliBaba, and I can find what I want in red or blue, but purple is proving to be difficult (remember, that’s the point of this exercise — only fun if it’s difficult. This is the “thrill of the chase” that I once got from hunting obscure used paper book, and then later got by tracking down weird bottles of alcohol).
Since finding the necklace was clearly impossible, I have switched to identifying components. I’ve learned about collapsible eye beading needles. I know to check hole size. I’ve found griffin silk thread in an appropriate purple shade. Etc. And at the component point in the search, I was served up a weird URL (do not go here!): bk.wdxsk.com (I’m not worried about you going here — it’s not even there any more, really).
But the website itself claimed to be Vinnies.com, and was — I learned later — a clone of a real Australian St. Vincent de Paul website. Great design. No search box, which was weird, but I’d gone in on a google search to an image of about 30 beads for about $30, with several pictures. The purple was implausible for corundum, but not unattractive. I wavered. I showed it to R. I didn’t mention to him the missing search functionality or the odd URL. I put the item in my shopping cart and clicked through to checkout. I picked PayPal and it asked for a credit card number. I backed out, and picked credit card / PayPal and that gave me PayPal. Weird — and really alarming in retrospect — but I carried on. It did not show me the credit card attached to the PayPal, only the debit card / bank account. Again, weird, but again, small dollar. I clicked through, and here the jetlag came for me. I failed to notice while clicking that the dollar amount changed until I’d hit the final click. Oh no.
I IMMEDIATELY — at 8:38 pm eastern — filed a dispute with PayPal. And less than 10 minutes later, they resolved it in the seller’s favor, because the seller had provided them with 8 USPS tracking numbers that had been fulfilled. When I clicked through, they were from all over the United States with delivery dates in November. Transparently obvious fraud — altho apparently not to whatever bot was resolving disputes while the humans sleep. At this point, I attempted twice to escalate and provide documentation, but both times PayPal timed out on me and said try again. Now I’m panicking. Here’s what I wrote for that dispute that never uploaded (remember, at this point I don’t yet realize that the entire website is a partial clone of Vinnie’s and is completely fraudulent):
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
On December 29 around 8:30 pm, I was shopping at Vinnies at bk.wdxsk.com. I was going to order some $30 “sapphire” beads because they looked kind of cool. I am not familiar with this website, so I picked the paypal option, which then showed me a credit card screen. I backed out and tried the other payment option, “Credit Card / PayPal”, and went to a paypal screen that had my TD Bank info altho oddly not my credit card. That’s fine, I tapped my way through. And then, at the end of the process, it showed a receipt not for $40 something with the $5 shipping fee, but rather $1999. W.T.F.
I immediately went over to the paypal website to see if this was really happening. It was. I disputed it. Then I called my bank, TD Bank, and they said they didn’t have the charge yet, and couldn’t do anything about it but said PayPal was generally pretty good about things, which has been my experience as well.
Minutes later — less than 30 minutes from the original insane $1,999, which was subsequently increased by the seller to over $2000 — the PayPal dispute was decided in favor of the seller. Why?!?
Meanwhile, I had 8 messages from the “seller” via PayPal, not Vinnie’s — Vinnie’s has no idea I even completed a transaction. The beads I was trying to order are still sitting in my cart over there and I have received no confirmation from them for anything. The “seller” had sent me messages via PayPal with USPS tracking information. Here are the tracking numbers they sent me through PayPal, with the information that USPS supplies when you look up those tracking numbers:
9300110597204855886803
Your item was delivered in or at the mailbox at 2:09 pm on November 24, 2025 in POPLAR BLUFF, MO 63901.
9300110597204856210904
Your item was delivered in or at the mailbox at 12:50 pm on November 20, 2025 in NORTON, MA 02766.
9300110597204855896840
Your item was delivered in or at the mailbox at 7:37 pm on November 24, 2025 in VALLIANT, OK 74764.
9300110597204855886957
Your item was delivered in or at the mailbox at 2:17 pm on November 19, 2025 in SCOTTSBURG, IN 47170.
9300110597204856243728
Your item was delivered at the front door or porch at 1:10 pm on November 20, 2025 in WEST PALM BEACH, FL 33405.
9300110597204856223362
Your item was delivered in or at the mailbox at 1:59 pm on November 24, 2025 in KENT, WA 98032.
9300110597204856246132
Your item was delivered in or at the mailbox at 2:32 pm on November 21, 2025 in ARCADIA, OK 73007.
9300110597204856248976
Your item was delivered in or at the mailbox at 4:04 pm on November 20, 2025 in FORT WALTON BEACH, FL 32548.
I found a phone number for PayPal, and called it a few minutes after 9 pm ET, however, you apparently don’t have humans answering the phone after 6 pm PT, which is 9 pm ET, so I have to wait until tomorrow.
To recap: I tried to buy something at Vinnie’s / bk.wdxsk.com, using paypal, was charged a completely unexpected amount of money, disputed it saying I wanted a refund and hadn’t received anything, and then PayPal resolved the dispute in favor of the seller, on the basis of 8 USPS tracking numbers that delivered on dates ranging from November 19- November 24, all over the country and none of them my address, when I had literally placed the order minutes earlier on December 29.
I don’t know what went wrong, or where. But I do know that the person who is posing as a “seller” to PayPal is absolutely committing fraud. I didn’t authorize a charge in that amount, certainly not to them, and I definitely haven’t received anything from the “seller”. I never even got any kind of confirmation email from them. The only contact I’ve had with the “seller” is via PayPal.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
I called my bank and at that point, the charge wasn’t showing at all, even as pending.
On Tuesday Dec 30, I called when PayPal had humans in customer service, and told her verbally the summary of what happened plus the USPS tracking numbers being delivered in November. Seller was banned immediately, and a 10 day investigation started. The customer service rep spoke as if assuming I would be refunded my money. By this point, the ACH was “pending” at TD Bank. I asked if I should call my bank back and start a dispute there, and she recommended I call and ask if they had any way of stopping the charge, but not to start a dispute.
So I called TD Bank and reached a very nice lady who was very sympathetic. She reached out to her leadership chat and did a stop order and waived the fee for it. There’s no certainty this will work, but if it does, it saves everyone the money going to Russia (the “seller” had a yandex.ru email).
At this point, I’m just waiting to see what happens next. I’m grateful that a scammer did not wind up with my bank routing and/or account numbers (thank you PayPal for that!) and won’t be able to authorize any more money. I’m glad I didn’t type in a credit card number. I now have several additional methods for spotting scams:
Weird URL
Lack of search box where there should be one
A listing that is “off” but otherwise exactly what I had been failing to find with many, many, many searches
PayPal not showing me a credit card option at the payment screen
The second woman I talked to at TD Bank also no longer trusts PayPal — she assumes they were bought by someone and the new management is no good. I know that’s not the case, but PayPal might want to give a little thought to the erosion of trust that is happening to them.
Finally, here are some ways this could have gone even worse for me. The entire website was fraudulent, but I didn’t figure that out right away. I went back and looked at the cart and the item was still there and I’d never received a confirmation email, so I thought at this point it was some kind of man-in-the-middle or skimmer fraud. If I had gone through the checkout process a second time, thinking, wait, maybe I can fix this, I could have generated multiple PayPal charges. If I had attempted using a credit card number, I’d be spending even more time talking to the Chase fraud department (I’ve spent a lot of time talking to them lately, because they keep stopping legitimate charges as fraud, and it’s been tough getting vendors paid).
If you are searching for something on google and struggling to find it, and you land on a website you are not familiar with that appears to have what you are looking for for cheap, and you are thinking, what the heck, it’s not that much money, what’s the worst that can happen take the following steps.
First: is the URL a weird, meaning-free set of letters? This website may be a partial clone of a real website, that has been seeded with something that is an AI generated listing matching your search terms. So the website might look very high quality, have no ads, etc., and may even be a vaguely recognizable brand you’ve never personally shopped at — but that URL doesn’t make sense.
Second: if you are using PayPal, and you have both a bank account / debit card AND a credit card attached to your PayPal, but PayPal is only showing you the bank account / debit card as an option, that’s because you are doing a bank transfer to the other person. You are basically sending money as if through zelle or Venmo or similar bank transfer and that can wind up overseas and unrecoverable very quickly.
Third: pay super close attention as you move through the PayPal payment screens, because the low dollar amount that caused you to decide to try this weird website may switch to something substantially larger.
Any of these three things should have caused me to stop and avoid this scam, but I was jetlagged and having fun shopping online. I actually showed this to Roland, and he, too, was like, eh, it’s $40, might as well take a flier on it. I did not consciously attend to these three things, and I certainly didn’t interpret them correctly. I saw a very professional looking website that was well-populated (Vinnie’s, an Australian website for St. Vincent de Paul). I noticed it had a weird URL, but I’ve seen some really odd URLs on legit websites. I will not accept an odd URL without further investigation ever again. I also couldn’t find a search box, which was odd, but didn’t trigger immediate suspicion. IT SHOULD HAVE. A partial clone of a website will typically remove almost all functionality that is not text / photos / links. It’s a funnel to a payment screen to try to get you to send money via PayPal or give them your credit card information.
So, here’s the story.
I’d gotten through a ton of tasks during the day, and I was tired and not interested in doing any more work. I’d had an idea that sounded like do-able, but hard to find, which is my favorite kind of shopping, because if I find something right away, the fun is over. I AM GOING TO GET A BETTER HOBBY. I’ll probably go back to lego and podcasts. I was not drinking. It was not late for me (I’d recently returned from California, and it was 8:30 pm eastern time).
I’m shopping for my hard to find item, which is a bead necklace. I’ve established I want 10 mm beads, ideally purple corundum. I could back down to amethyst, but the corundum means I don’t have to take care of this item at all; it will be largely impervious to damage. I want individual knots between the beads, and I want it to be about 30” long, but I could go longer or slightly shorter. Basically, just shy of opera length. I’ve already looked at a bunch of the other purple stones and concluded — as I always do — that they are too soft and/or prone to chipping / cracking. I’m happy with synthetic / lab grown, and I have found an etsy seller who will sell individual 10 mm purple corundum (with stars!) beads, but they are $26.90 each, and at that length, that’s enough money to give me pause. (This is likely what I will end up doing, and honestly, it’s about the amount of money the scammer is trying to extract from me, which we will get to shortly.) I try AliBaba, and I can find what I want in red or blue, but purple is proving to be difficult (remember, that’s the point of this exercise — only fun if it’s difficult. This is the “thrill of the chase” that I once got from hunting obscure used paper book, and then later got by tracking down weird bottles of alcohol).
Since finding the necklace was clearly impossible, I have switched to identifying components. I’ve learned about collapsible eye beading needles. I know to check hole size. I’ve found griffin silk thread in an appropriate purple shade. Etc. And at the component point in the search, I was served up a weird URL (do not go here!): bk.wdxsk.com (I’m not worried about you going here — it’s not even there any more, really).
But the website itself claimed to be Vinnies.com, and was — I learned later — a clone of a real Australian St. Vincent de Paul website. Great design. No search box, which was weird, but I’d gone in on a google search to an image of about 30 beads for about $30, with several pictures. The purple was implausible for corundum, but not unattractive. I wavered. I showed it to R. I didn’t mention to him the missing search functionality or the odd URL. I put the item in my shopping cart and clicked through to checkout. I picked PayPal and it asked for a credit card number. I backed out, and picked credit card / PayPal and that gave me PayPal. Weird — and really alarming in retrospect — but I carried on. It did not show me the credit card attached to the PayPal, only the debit card / bank account. Again, weird, but again, small dollar. I clicked through, and here the jetlag came for me. I failed to notice while clicking that the dollar amount changed until I’d hit the final click. Oh no.
I IMMEDIATELY — at 8:38 pm eastern — filed a dispute with PayPal. And less than 10 minutes later, they resolved it in the seller’s favor, because the seller had provided them with 8 USPS tracking numbers that had been fulfilled. When I clicked through, they were from all over the United States with delivery dates in November. Transparently obvious fraud — altho apparently not to whatever bot was resolving disputes while the humans sleep. At this point, I attempted twice to escalate and provide documentation, but both times PayPal timed out on me and said try again. Now I’m panicking. Here’s what I wrote for that dispute that never uploaded (remember, at this point I don’t yet realize that the entire website is a partial clone of Vinnie’s and is completely fraudulent):
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
On December 29 around 8:30 pm, I was shopping at Vinnies at bk.wdxsk.com. I was going to order some $30 “sapphire” beads because they looked kind of cool. I am not familiar with this website, so I picked the paypal option, which then showed me a credit card screen. I backed out and tried the other payment option, “Credit Card / PayPal”, and went to a paypal screen that had my TD Bank info altho oddly not my credit card. That’s fine, I tapped my way through. And then, at the end of the process, it showed a receipt not for $40 something with the $5 shipping fee, but rather $1999. W.T.F.
I immediately went over to the paypal website to see if this was really happening. It was. I disputed it. Then I called my bank, TD Bank, and they said they didn’t have the charge yet, and couldn’t do anything about it but said PayPal was generally pretty good about things, which has been my experience as well.
Minutes later — less than 30 minutes from the original insane $1,999, which was subsequently increased by the seller to over $2000 — the PayPal dispute was decided in favor of the seller. Why?!?
Meanwhile, I had 8 messages from the “seller” via PayPal, not Vinnie’s — Vinnie’s has no idea I even completed a transaction. The beads I was trying to order are still sitting in my cart over there and I have received no confirmation from them for anything. The “seller” had sent me messages via PayPal with USPS tracking information. Here are the tracking numbers they sent me through PayPal, with the information that USPS supplies when you look up those tracking numbers:
9300110597204855886803
Your item was delivered in or at the mailbox at 2:09 pm on November 24, 2025 in POPLAR BLUFF, MO 63901.
9300110597204856210904
Your item was delivered in or at the mailbox at 12:50 pm on November 20, 2025 in NORTON, MA 02766.
9300110597204855896840
Your item was delivered in or at the mailbox at 7:37 pm on November 24, 2025 in VALLIANT, OK 74764.
9300110597204855886957
Your item was delivered in or at the mailbox at 2:17 pm on November 19, 2025 in SCOTTSBURG, IN 47170.
9300110597204856243728
Your item was delivered at the front door or porch at 1:10 pm on November 20, 2025 in WEST PALM BEACH, FL 33405.
9300110597204856223362
Your item was delivered in or at the mailbox at 1:59 pm on November 24, 2025 in KENT, WA 98032.
9300110597204856246132
Your item was delivered in or at the mailbox at 2:32 pm on November 21, 2025 in ARCADIA, OK 73007.
9300110597204856248976
Your item was delivered in or at the mailbox at 4:04 pm on November 20, 2025 in FORT WALTON BEACH, FL 32548.
I found a phone number for PayPal, and called it a few minutes after 9 pm ET, however, you apparently don’t have humans answering the phone after 6 pm PT, which is 9 pm ET, so I have to wait until tomorrow.
To recap: I tried to buy something at Vinnie’s / bk.wdxsk.com, using paypal, was charged a completely unexpected amount of money, disputed it saying I wanted a refund and hadn’t received anything, and then PayPal resolved the dispute in favor of the seller, on the basis of 8 USPS tracking numbers that delivered on dates ranging from November 19- November 24, all over the country and none of them my address, when I had literally placed the order minutes earlier on December 29.
I don’t know what went wrong, or where. But I do know that the person who is posing as a “seller” to PayPal is absolutely committing fraud. I didn’t authorize a charge in that amount, certainly not to them, and I definitely haven’t received anything from the “seller”. I never even got any kind of confirmation email from them. The only contact I’ve had with the “seller” is via PayPal.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
I called my bank and at that point, the charge wasn’t showing at all, even as pending.
On Tuesday Dec 30, I called when PayPal had humans in customer service, and told her verbally the summary of what happened plus the USPS tracking numbers being delivered in November. Seller was banned immediately, and a 10 day investigation started. The customer service rep spoke as if assuming I would be refunded my money. By this point, the ACH was “pending” at TD Bank. I asked if I should call my bank back and start a dispute there, and she recommended I call and ask if they had any way of stopping the charge, but not to start a dispute.
So I called TD Bank and reached a very nice lady who was very sympathetic. She reached out to her leadership chat and did a stop order and waived the fee for it. There’s no certainty this will work, but if it does, it saves everyone the money going to Russia (the “seller” had a yandex.ru email).
At this point, I’m just waiting to see what happens next. I’m grateful that a scammer did not wind up with my bank routing and/or account numbers (thank you PayPal for that!) and won’t be able to authorize any more money. I’m glad I didn’t type in a credit card number. I now have several additional methods for spotting scams:
Weird URL
Lack of search box where there should be one
A listing that is “off” but otherwise exactly what I had been failing to find with many, many, many searches
PayPal not showing me a credit card option at the payment screen
The second woman I talked to at TD Bank also no longer trusts PayPal — she assumes they were bought by someone and the new management is no good. I know that’s not the case, but PayPal might want to give a little thought to the erosion of trust that is happening to them.
Finally, here are some ways this could have gone even worse for me. The entire website was fraudulent, but I didn’t figure that out right away. I went back and looked at the cart and the item was still there and I’d never received a confirmation email, so I thought at this point it was some kind of man-in-the-middle or skimmer fraud. If I had gone through the checkout process a second time, thinking, wait, maybe I can fix this, I could have generated multiple PayPal charges. If I had attempted using a credit card number, I’d be spending even more time talking to the Chase fraud department (I’ve spent a lot of time talking to them lately, because they keep stopping legitimate charges as fraud, and it’s been tough getting vendors paid).