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(longish) ;)

Hmmm. Find out where they are operating from? And how do you expect them to do that, may I ask you? Please understand that it is very difficult and almost impossible to do anything like that. Even if you are law enforcement agency. And PayPal, like I said, is NOT a law inforcement agency. They do not have an AUTHORITY to do things like that. They can report accidents of fraud to appropriate authorithies - and I believe they do. But besides that they are very limited.

To give you a scope on the level of difficulty of the task you are asking them to do, let me give you a simple example. Let's assume I am a scammer. I buy anonimously a list of "private proxies" from someone on the Web - that's a list of somebody's machines infected with troyans that can work as proxies. Now I do all my scamming activity, say, from Moscos, via a CHAIN of those proxies, let's say, 5 in 5 different countries. Computer owners are not even aware that something is going on. Let's say I manage to get a bunch of suckers that click on the link in my scam emails and enter their real login/password info (of course I host the scammers website where I collect the data, on legitimate hosting provider, but I pay with a stolen credit card). I get to their accounts via this chain of proxies, and transfer the money to a separate account. Then I use one of automated e-currency exchanges to transfer the stuff to egold, then to something else, then to webmoney, and finally I get cash in Moscow from legitimate webmoney agent.

Now let's say PayPal has recorder the transaction and got the IP address of the last machine in the chain. It is a computer in Singapore. How do you expect them to find out the rest of the stuff - the computer owner is an innocent sucker who doesn't even know he's got a troyan. Besides, like I said, PayPal can not even APPROACH the person with a request to investigate anything - doesn't have an authority. PayPal files a case with law enforcement people. They finally manage via their colleagues in Singapore to find the sucker (computer owner whose machine was used to access PayPal) only to find out that he is just an innocent lover of free porn who got infected on one of free porn sites. Of course his computer doesn't have ANY logs - this type of troyans don't keep logs of activity, as you understand. Let's say by some sort of miracle they manage to get his ISP logs (most likey they were deleted months ago, but let's say they did manage to get an IP address of the machine that connected to sucker's computer).

Guess what? That's ANOTHER innocent sucker infected by troyan, this time from Chile. And there is 4 more in chain - in UK, France, Belorussia and Indonesia. And the initial connection was made from a computer on a dialup connection with a pre-paid cellular account (anonymous) and with prepaid internet card.

And if they try to investigate a website - it was, like I said, paid with a stolen card, and access to the hosting server where I put my scam site, was made through another chain of "private" proxies. ;)))

NOW you tell me how do you expect PayPal to find out WHO they are, Iam not even asking about shutting them down. The things you are asking are IMPOSSIBLE. They only thing PayPal can do is to report fraud to authorities, and try to educate their users.

Scammers do the same phishing thing with banks, too. Does this mean that banks should start playing detectives and try to "find out who are the scammers and shut them down"? No way. It is simply impossible. Technically and physically impossible.

I don't like PayPal myself (and their customer service do suck big time), but I look at the situaton realistically. There is NO WAY they can do anything. The only possibility (and very slight, by the way) to catch the scammers is to follow the money chain and see where it ends. However, with 1000's ways to get money out anonymously these days, it is almost impossible task. And definitely not what PayPal can do alone.

And while there are suckers, there will be scam. Always. It is a human nature and I don't think anything can be done about it. All you can do is to try to educate people around you, and educate yourself.

As for scammers - believe me, they will pay. Sooner or later, they will pay. And they will pay it all - that's universal law. Scammers are poor idiots, they just don't understand that they sign own death warrant. ;)

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