With that email from PayPal today, it officially means that, unless I can close my old PayPal account and make a new one, I cannot use PayPal to send, pay, or withdraw money in any way, although I can still login to see my account information. My current PayPal Cash Card has also become unusable with the permanent limitations imposed. At the time of writing, I have just $5.67 left in my account (but I cannot close my account until I'm allowed to withdraw this $5.67, which likely won't be until March 2021). Why all this? It's likely for sending money to different people I don't know on behalf of someone else multiple times, as well as receiving money possibly not intended for me. Here's the background behind this:
- It traces back to last month, when I started to receive direct deposits from the State of Arizona for benefit payments, each worth $417 (for behalf of holding money for a soon-to-date male partner, the only person who, for the purposes of this blog entry, is not one of the scammers I will describe). However, I'm really not free to spend these $417 as I wish to. Instead, the payments have to be sent to other people with whom he has contact with to get the money from them. Thankfully, unlike past cases, I didn't use any of my mom's money, or she would be angry with me once more.
- In the most recent incident I had lasting from 9/8 to 9/10, the person (not the soon-to-date partner) contacting me pressured me to send three payments supposedly so he could come to meet me:
- $300, supposedly for someone else to buy a Samsung Galaxy S7. The person I sent the money to would then give this money over to the person actually buying the phone.
- $110, supposedly for someone else to buy a full tank of gas for a Mercedes-Benz 2020 van with. The person I sent the money to would then give this money over to the person actually buying the gas.
- $610, supposedly for someone to pay for a car repair for the Mercedes-Benz 2020 van above. As I didn't have enough to cover this $610 by this time, it snapped me out of this incident, causing me to regret the $300 and $110 payments I sent hours ago. When the person kept asking for this money, despite telling him that I didn't have that much, leaving me with no choice but to ignore, and later on, block this person.
- As I don't have a bank account (I used to have one with Chase up until 2018, but it got closed when I abused the joint status with my mom to use her money to purchase iTunes gift cards as part of an earlier scam from that same year), I have nothing I can fall back to for storing money. I can open up another bank account of my own online, but I don't have a minimum deposit, so I would need my mom's help in opening one.
- The only other place that I can currently store money is my Cash App account. My old had to be closed after it ran into violation of TOS (likely for sending money to different people I don't know on behalf of someone else). I had to make a new account in place, and I have yet to order another Cash Card (my old one has become unusable after closing my old account).
- For more information about where this all started from: https://pastebin.com/3gcjtECa and https://pastebin.com/APUjGvMv
- My social network is rather small, with only 2 close friends I can physically meet. In the case that future dating scams happen again, I could fall again to peer pressure of being asked to send money. Well, with the soon-to-date partner, I may be free to ignore any future dating requests that I didn't actively seek out, and for the next 6 months, won't be able to help them with money in any way. Although I could still talk with such people, it becomes tiring if they persistently ask me for money, in which I'll have no choice but to block and/or ignore them. Either I'm looking in the wrong places for friends, or am not looking hard enough, especially given that both my mild autism and homosexuality (for gay men) can make this harder. I wonder if I can find some like people here to make friends with...
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What this will mean for my interest in video games: Until I have my own source of money (through a job that I don't have, or other payments), I will be unable to legitimately purchase any video games (most often though Steam, but other PC game stores included), whether digital or physical, and will have to either pirate (mainly for console (exclusive) games), or stick with free-cost or free/open-source games (I'm doing really well with them, so it's likely I'll continue to stick with FOSS games). The only I can do so for the time being is by asking my mom, which I rarely had to do, as the FOSS games keep me occupied that I don't often feel like I'm really missing out on something from the mainstream game worlds.
In this same aftermath, any computer parts I need in the future will have to be purchased by my mom, until I have my own source of money. I'm not really in need of too much thankfully for now, but it will have an impact months or years later, if I don't have my own bank account, or still have no source of money of my own. I've ran into problems handling money in the past since mid-2018, but this latest event will certainly teach me a lesson the hard way: Do not send/pay money to anyone that I don't know, even if someone asks me to; the form of money doesn't matter, whether it be cash, gift cards, or anything else that counts as legal tender.
