Lately we've been getting reports indicating this issue at PayPal's end has cropped up once again, so we've revived our ticket about it with PayPal MTS. They are aware of the problem and have Developers working on resolving it at their end.
To summarize what's going on here, so you won't have to scroll up through this enormous forum thread to catch up:
Whenever we receive IPN (Instant Payment Notification) from PayPal confirming they completed a buyer's payment, before we process that order we first check to make sure that the item price(s) reported in that IPN match or exceed the current Price settings for those item(s) in our system, and that the payment total in the IPN matches the sum of the item price(s) plus tax and shipping amounts in that IPN. If either of these checks fail, we send the seller a Suspected Fraud email with the IPN details to alert you to the discrepancy, so you can decide what to do about it.
The sporadic but long-recurring issue at PayPal's end is sometimes causing their system to generate IPNs that either:
- Report a payment total (
mc_gross) that does not include the reported tax amount in that same IPN, so the buyer only paid for the item price(s) alone without any tax, or...
- Report preliminary
shipping_option_amount and/or tax amount(s) that do not match the correct and final tax/shipping amounts the buyer actually paid.
This causes a failure (false-positive) of our potential-fraud check because the IPN reports a payment total (mc_gross) that does not match the sum of item price(s) (mc_gross1/2/3/etc.) plus tax and shipping amount(s) in that IPN.
In the latest recurrence of this issue, it appears that payment total (mc_gross) in IPN accurately reflects what the buyer actually paid -- i.e., the affected sellers confirm the buyer paid for either:
- The items alone, without paying any tax amount calculated for that order and reported in the IPN, or...
- The items plus accurate tax/shipping, when the tax/shipping amount(s) in the IPN are incorrect for the buyer's final shipping address.
If you receive a Suspected Fraud email from us, first thing to do is check your E-junkie Transaction Log to see if the order is listed there -- if so, that confirms we did process the order and would have issued any download link(s) that buyer purchased. If you don't see the order listed there, that indicates we did not process the order, so you can manually issue links to the affected buyer under Manage Buyers > Send Free Download Link/Code in your E-junkie Dashboard.
We apologize for the inconvenience and concern this issue may cause, but the problem is happening at PayPal's end, so unfortunately we're at their mercy waiting on their Devs to fix it. If you receive a Suspected Fraud email from us and still aren't sure what happened there, feel free to forward that email to support@e-junkie.com so we can have a look.
Edit to add: We are capturing instances of these erroneous IPNs with discrepancies, so we can provide those samples to PayPal MTS for their Devs' investigation. You do not need to forward Suspected Fraud emails to us just to inform us of the issue or provide those IPN details, but feel free to do so if you'd still like us to clarify what the problem was for that transaction.
