Are you getting a lot of small donations from Australia?

[Juraj M.]

I have an unusual question - are you receiving small (1-5€) donations from Australia?

Because I do now, for a few weeks.

And the email address it's coming from looks totally generated, some even have text 2024 in them! And they are all from Australia! None of my extensions has any extra users count in there.

It's not that I mind some extra donations, but it feels like I'm part of some bigger scam I don't understand.

Any ideas how this could be profitable to anyone?

[Deco]

It's possible, albeit unlikely that the donations are fraudulent if you don't expect them - the CWS store doesn't need to necessarily correlate country/origin for purchase, there’s a variety of reasons why they could be different. 

In general I'd say proceed with caution, and keep the money reserved incase they are fraudulent and chargebacks are issued so you can fund them.

Thanks,

Deco

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[Juraj M.]

The screenshot is from my PayPal account, does CWS has some donation system I don't know about?

I've contacted also PayPal now.

[Deco]

By CWS I was implying the dashboard for the stats page which shows you your users, not a donation store, bad wording because of what the acronym stands for.

Thanks,

Deco

[Michel Gutierrez]

From time to time, i get a bunch of donations, like a few dozens in a row, with forged emails (a name plus a few digits). This is the result of people getting their hands on a list of credit cards and testing if they are valid. I recommend refunding those donations because if real owners of a card open disputes, you will lose them and you will have to pay for the disputes fees. It's unfair but this is the way it is.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/chromium-extensions/CABcX4UdO5xFBfTmSzaA-t8vfTAwHPA4-enZBA7v_%2By20WYu6aQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Juraj M.]

That's crazy!

Few years back they did charge me with some dispute fee (around 25€) but I wrote them angry letter (like wtf someone sends me money and refunds it and I have to pay for that?!?) and they refunded that right away and it never happened again. So that could have been this case too!

Sooo, what a moral dilemma... will refunding really help anyone? Will the original owner know his card info has been stolen? You see, they are indeed supporting a poor developer from Slovakia :D, even if not willingly. And if they knew me, they would for sure send me even more!

Oh man... like I don't have 100 other issues to deal with, now this :(.

I've contacted PayPal and they say they will look into it, so let's see what they can do:

> All transactions processed through PayPal goes through our fraud prevention system, so most suspicious activities are stopped before they get completed.  Still, to be on the safe side, I’ll send a request to have these transactions reviewed thoroughly.  If anything unusual turns up, we’ll let you know through an email.

[Roberto Oneto]

In a normal world (which we are not living in) there should be insurance to cover these unclear transactions.

If there is no scam and in any case the scammer is not you, I don't see the reason why you should pay, since the manager of the monetary transaction has not used all the security measures to prevent these cases from happening.

In principle, it will be up to the transaction manager to take action against the fraudster when and if he discovers his identity or to request reimbursement from the insurance companies.

On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if the manager tried to blame you for everything; we know well that facing a lawsuit for a handful of dollars against these giants is anything but healthy.

If this happened, however, you could talk about what happened on as many social networks as possible. Nobody likes bad publicity.