This happened to me a couple of weeks ago, saw it happen over at KVR leading to a huge argument between three people, and it's actually happened tonight to a forumite paying me for some software.
You'll see that Paypal now has a more 'tablet' style interface on the main website. When it comes to sending a payment, most of us will copy and paste the email address of the person we are paying from a message they have sent. This can be done quickly and easily. However the tablet interface site autoloads previous email addresses you have sent money to. It is very easy and possible to accidentally click on one of these address, overwriting the address you want to send it to. You then go to the next screen, click away and bang, the money is sent.
In my case, I accidentally sent £120 to someone via PPG. They accepted it, meaning I had no chance to recall it. I was very lucky that the person I had sent it to was a forumite. I had a panic for two days and then got an email from him saying he'd been away from home and had refunded the lot. Thanks to him! (and I still owe him a tenner in thanks for that).
I tried replicating this mistake and did it successfully more than once (without sending cash obviously). It's simply poor web design.
@PolarityMan has just had the same experience paying me tonight.
If you use the Classic Paypal site (the link is at the bottom of every Paypal page), the autoloading of previous used email addresses does not happen. It's much safer to do it this way. I would strongly recommend that you use the Classic interface when sending Paypal Gift payments as it's a lot harder recalling those if mistakes do happen.
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*An Official Foo-Approved guitarist since Sept 2023.
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