Strange PayPal Fraud or Scam

prettyandfluffy

My OH has just received 2 emails, the first purporting to be from PayPal saying someone has sent him €20 (we're in the U.K.), the second one inviting him to message the sender of the €20.  He's checked his PayPal account and the money is there even though he's not expecting any money from anyone.  He has blocked the sender from messaging him on PayPal and reported both emails to PayPal.  My question is: what kind of weird scam is this? I can't quite work it out.  The email address the sender is using isn't a genuine PayPal email address but close enough if you didn't check carefully.

gm0

Watch the 20. It will disappear.

The intention is for you to refund it.  As a nice person receiving a payment to the wrong account

And then a payment clearance/reversal process will snatch it back from paypal. Who will snatch the original payment from you

And then you don't have your 20 or the first one.  And they have both.  Sorted.

And will struggle to get them to send it back to you

The payment method you use is unlikely to be so accommodating

They are not really risking lots of 20 per each email they do this with

prettyandfluffy

gm0 said:

Watch the 20. It will disappear.

The intention is for you to refund it.  As a nice person receiving a payment to the wrong account

And then a payment clearance/reversal process will snatch it back from paypal. Who will snatch the original payment from you

And then you don't have your 20 or the first one.  And they have both.  Sorted.

And will struggle to get them to send it back to you

The payment method you use is unlikely to be so accommodating

They are not really risking lots of 20 per each email they do this with

Thank you, that makes sense.  He hasn't refunded the payment and won't.  

Albermarle

prettyandfluffy said:

gm0 said:

Watch the 20. It will disappear.

The intention is for you to refund it.  As a nice person receiving a payment to the wrong account

And then a payment clearance/reversal process will snatch it back from paypal. Who will snatch the original payment from you

And then you don't have your 20 or the first one.  And they have both.  Sorted.

And will struggle to get them to send it back to you

The payment method you use is unlikely to be so accommodating

They are not really risking lots of 20 per each email they do this with

Thank you, that makes sense.  He hasn't refunded the payment and won't.  

Assuming some others will not refund, then maybe they are only making €5 or even less overall.
Seems a lot of effort to make such small sums of money.