Fraudulent orders from Dubai, how does this work?

When they say 'bank transfer', they probably mean they have hacked into a paypal acount and intend to pay you with funds/credit cards belonging to the account. Not sure whether they can be grabbed back.

Dunno, but details of who to report it to on the African scams section here

Interested to see the US Secret Service request examples of the emails for data mining purposes.

Daytona

If the bank transfer is from a phished account and made without the owner's permission, then it can and will be reversed.

Ultimately, no form of payment is 100% guaranteed.

In PayPal language I think it's called a Chargeback. Here's a page which explains some of it, I think largely from the point of view of an eBay transaction:

Of course the transaction will be reversed in the phished account.

But will it ( / can it, even) be reversed in the receiving a/c? Might the bank end up taking the loss rather than the other "victim" (receiver of transaction)?

Good question.

I have just phoned up my bank (Bank of Scotland) and this is what they say:

In the case of an incoming electronic transfer:

The money is received as cleared funds. However a mistake/fraud at the sending end can result in the money coming out again, in the first 1-2 days.

After that, they need the account holder's (my) permission, no matter what the reason, and he can refuse. (I am not sure if this is really true; for example see the numerous court cases where somebody got a mystery credit into their account; the only time where they could keep the funds is where they spent them without realising)

In the case of an incoming cheque:

They can be uncleared for a number of days (UK cheques) or several months (foreign cheques regardless of currency)

I asked what happens if when I am making an electronic payment to somebody, as is very common these days, and I mistype the account number. They told me I lose the money, unless the recipient agrees to return it.

Suprising answers?

I do know of one case, somewhat related, where we asked BOS to make a bank transfer to a supplier in China. They lost the mailed instruction, so we faxed it. Later they did both so we paid twice. Our supplier never refunded the money to BOS, but they reimbursed us. They then hassled us for about a year to get our supplier to authorise their bank to return the money, but eventually forgot about it. As a result of this we never fax them; we always just mail them.

Paypal is something else. There is a lot of stuff on the web about them allowing chargebacks after weeks or months, with no appeal. I would have hoped that this has been stopped by the UK FSA.

Except Western Union Money Transfer, which is why Nigerian fraudsters like it so much.