Payment ends up in the wrong bank account

Hi @gottschalk

Alternative payment methods such as EPS are push payments, so it will debit the customer’s bank account as soon as they have authorized/approved the payment from their online banking.

These payments are not going into the bank account you linked to your PayPal account. Instead, the money goes to bank accounts belonging to PayPal.
Once this payment has been captured (WC order created and processed), the funds are automatically added to your PayPal merchant account: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/checkout/apm/eps/#link-howitworks

If the funds are not captured, they will be refunded automatically after 3 hours (by default). Depending on the bank, the buyer should see the refund in a few days, as SEPA transactions take a day to process.
When no order has been created in WooCommerce, then PayPal Payments will also not have captured the payment and so no funds would be added to the merchant account.

If I search for this account number on the Internet, I find other users who describe exactly this situation.

As far as I can tell, most of these reports are not worth taking seriously. APM payments can sometimes fail to finalize (e.g. when webhooks are not working) and in that case, the customer may need to wait a few days before the automatic refund arrives.
Sometimes, this can be enough time for users to conclude fraud when there has not been any fraud, and more likely sometthing like a technical issue (webhooks not working).

Kind regards,
Niklas

Dear Niklas!

Thank you for your response.

There has been some development in the meantime. As it turns out the problem is not with your plugin, but with PayPal – something I wouldn’t have thought to be possible.

If EPS payment is initialized via the PayPal Pop-Up, the account number ending up at the bank is the fraudulent one I sent before. This behavior can be reproduced and is happening on every EPS transfer. This occurs on multiple Woocommerce installations and regardless which Plugin is used for the PayPal connection. I tried to integrate PayPal EPS with the WebToffee-Plugin with the same result !!!

Your right that no funds have been lost, since PayPal didn’t carry out the fraudulent transfer.

But we probably lost a bunch of orders, since in these cases no information about the order is received by WooCommerce. The customers just gets informed by PayPal that something went wrong and no money has been transferred. But if the customers tries to order with EPS a second time he runs into the same problem again.

I had no time to check our logfiles how often this was happening. But as far as we know, the merchant is not informed by PayPal about the fraud attempt happening. I am rather shocked by opaque behavior by PayPal.

I haven’t heard from the PayPal-Tech-Support yet. At this point the only option I see is to change the payment provider.

Any help is appreciated!

Best regards,
David

The same occurs with the payment method Sofort selected.

Hi @gottschalk

I’m not sure if I understand yet, what makes you think this is a fraudulent IBAN?
This is part of the transaction flow for alternative payment methods and how PayPal works. After confirming the payment in the online banking, the buyer should be forwarded to the order-received page and WooCommerce will initiate the regular payment notifications.

What happens for you after the EPS payment? Are you not redirected to the order-received page and is there no WooCommerce order created?

If you don’t want buyers to be provided any APMs, you can disable them individually with the Hide Funding Source(s) setting in the Standard Payments tab.

Kind regards,
Niklas

Hi Niklas!

Can you confirm the bank account belongs to PayPal then ?
This would be a big relief!

That was my first thinking, that this must be a PayPal bank account for payment processing. But when I tried to verify this, I only came across forum posts that talked about fraudulent operations. I would have assumed that an official PayPal bank account would be easier to associate.

And the other thing is that we got a bank statement from a customer, but we didn’t receive an order. As previously mentioned, the customer has since been informed that the payment will be returned.

Since you asked what happens after completing an EPS payment, I have now completed the payment process myself. And it’s the same for me as it was for the customer yesterday. After completing the transaction, I was not redirected to the merchant page. The money shows as debited from my bank account. (I hope it will be returned to me as well).

Nothing of the order can be seen in the WooCommerce backend.

Since there seems to be a problem here, I have already hidden these payment methods.

Unfortunately, I still haven’t heard anything from PayPal Techsupport.

Thank you for your help!

Best regards
David

Hi @gottschalk,

Can you confirm the bank account belongs to PayPal then ?
This would be a big relief!

I’m not the right person to tell you exactly which bank accounts belong to PayPal, but that’s what the APMs are for. The buyer sends the funds with the APM to PayPal, who will then move the funds into your PayPal business account upon capture. The PayPal Merchant Support can tell you more about how APMs work with PayPal.

After completing the transaction, I was not redirected to the merchant page. The money shows as debited from my bank account. (I hope it will be returned to me as well).

Could you please give it a try with a PayPal sandbox account connected?: https://woocommerce.com/document/woocommerce-paypal-payments/#testing-in-sandbox

After completing the APM payment in the popup window, the buyer should be redirected to the order-received page. If the buyer is not forwarded to this page, it’s likely the payment was not captured, resulting in an automatic refund after a while.

For successful APM payments, the webhooks are important. So we recommend resubscribing and simulating the webhooks as described here: https://woocommerce.com/document/woocommerce-paypal-payments/#webhook-status

Please let us know how this works for you. Thanks!

Kind regards,
Niklas

We have not heard back from you in a while, so I’m marking this thread as resolved.
Hopefully, you were able to proceed as advised above and get this clarified with the PayPal merchant support.
If you have any further questions, please feel free to reopen this topic or create a new one.

Thanks!