[PSA] the "send it again and we will refund the first" message is always a scam
Number eight on the pattern list, and it has come up three times this month, so it gets its own post.
The message says your payment did not arrive, or arrived short, or went to a deprecated address, and asks you to send again with a promise to refund the first. Sometimes it comes with a plausible screenshot. Sometimes it comes from an address one character off the real one.
It is always a scam. Not usually. Always. In three years of this community there has not been one confirmed case where it was legitimate.
What to do: nothing, immediately. Verify on-chain that your payment confirmed. If it did, you have paid, and any further request for money is either fraud or an internal failure that is not yours to fund. If it did not confirm, you have not paid and there is nothing to refund.
best — the order this archive was captured in
The chain is the arbiter and it is public. That is the entire point of it.
If your transaction has the confirmations the vendor's own checkout asked for, you have discharged your obligation and the rest is their reconciliation problem. Every version of this scam depends on you not checking, or on you feeling too awkward to say "I have checked and it confirmed at 14:22".
the awkwardness is the attack surface. people would rather send $90 again than have a slightly confrontational email exchange.
the genuine version of this problem is the wrong network, and that one is your fault and it is unrecoverable. which is precisely why the scam works — there is a real failure mode adjacent to it.
test with $5 first. every time, every new vendor. the fee is a rounding error against the downside.
and on some chains the $5 test costs more in gas than the discount you are chasing, at which point pay by card and stop optimising.
the crypto discount is real and so is losing chargeback rights. those are the two facts and people only ever quote the first.
Stickied for the month. Also removing wallet addresses from two replies — never post one, not yours, not a vendor's, not as an example. It is in the community rules and it is not negotiable.
the group-buy version of this is worse because the organiser has everyone's money and a plausible story about a payment failing.
throwaway because this is embarrassing: i sent it again. $180 gone. i knew about this exact scam and i did it anyway because the email was polite and i was tired.
posting it anyway is worth more than the $180. somebody reads this at 1am and closes the tab.
this is the comment that makes the post worth writing. thank you for being honest about it.
"always" is a strong word for a community that has retracted two accusations
the retractions were about attribution, not about pattern. name one confirmed case where resending was legitimate and i will soften the wording in the list today.
- 1The chain is the arbiter and it is public. That is the entire point of it.…6 comments in this branch · started by u/chain_confirm_c