What Are Refund Scams?

[Roxy]

Refund scams operate in the form of an email showing the email recipient a fake receipt or fake invoice from a purchase of goods or services for an order that was never actually made. The concept of the scam is to convince the recipient of the email that, although the order was supposedly placed and paid for by the potential scam victim, that the victim didn’t really intend to place the order, the order was perhaps placed accidentally, and now the fake company owes the email recipient (scam victim) a refund.

But of course it is just a fake email, a fake order and simply a meaningless hoax. The sender of the email is a common criminal, but will lie and claim that they are contacting the email recipient from a real company such as PayPal, Amazon, Norton, McAfee, Apple, Microsoft, AT&T, Geek Squad, etc.

In most cases the scam email will also contain a toll free telephone number in North America that the email recipient is asked to call. But if the email recipient contacts the email address or phone number being provided then the criminal who sent the email will state that the order referenced in the email was made accidentally, that it is an error, and that they will gladly refund the payment immediately in order to correct their mistake. The phone number will also most likely connect to a scammer located in a criminal call center in India.

However, the refund scam victim was never actually charged any money, nor did they ever really make any actual payments to these criminals from any of their accounts. Plus there was never a real order ever placed to begin with. Thus, the email is a complete lie and a scam. No real companies are involved, no one is due a refund and nobody will be receiving any money from the refund scammer. The only intention of the criminal sending the refund scam email is to steal all of the victim’s money if they are given the opportunity.

In many cases refund scammers will also ask permission to connect to a person’s computer using remote access software (such as TeamViewer, AnyDesk, AweSun, LogMeIn, Go-To-Meeting, etc) and then ask the scam victim to login to their online banking to initiate the fake refund. At this point the scammer will then take over remote access control of the victim’s computer and attempt to trick the victim into believing that, while sending the victim a refund, the scammer accidentally over refunded a large amount of additional money to the victim’s bank account by mistake, but this of course is also another lie and hoax.

A refund scammer will never put any real money into anyone’s bank account for any reason. Also, a scammer has no means of accessing or depositing any money into anyone’s bank account via their online banking. Thus, if a scammer shows a victim a lot of extra money in their online banking on their computer screen, which the scammer claims that they accidentally deposited into the victim’s bank account, then it is 100% fake. It is only a screen trick created by the scammer using their remote access to the victim’s computer and is intended to dupe, trick and fool the victim and yet no money has really been placed into the victim’s bank account at all.

Then the scammer will insist that the victim must immediately return a portion of this fake “over-refunded” money to the scammer. The scammer will also state that the victim must send the required money in cash via a courier service (like FedEx or DHL), or via postal mail, or by way of gift cards as a means of returning a portion of the fake over-refunded money to the scammer.

Of course any over-refunded money talked about by a scammer is a lie and if a scam victim sends any of their own real money to a criminal scammer in cash or via gift cards then it will be lost forever because the funds can't be tracked or traced to the scammer. Thus, nobody should ever send any money to a refund scammer for any reason.