A few months ago I finally had a donation via this site. My one and only. Needless to say, I was chuffed and even emailed the donater personally to thank them.

I heard nothing back until a few weeks later when PayPal informed me that the donater disputed the money and was requesting it back. They seemed to think it was for goods that I hadn’t delivered so I explained it was a donation and that my site name appears prominently during this process. They quickly backed my cause and rejected the dispute. However, their credit card company thought otherwise and withdrew the money.

But, hats off to PayPal, they persevered and disputed this “chargeback”. And won.

It is PayPal’s standard practice to dispute wrongful chargebacks. One of the benefits of using PayPal is that our team of chargeback specialists will gather the necessary information from you and work with the credit card company until the chargeback is resolved.

We appreciate your prompt response to our request for information about this transaction.

The money is now heading back towards me. Not that I longer feel that it was voluntarily donated out of good will, which is a shame.

But why would you donate a sum of money and then do whatever you can do to claw it back? Well, I suspect I know the answer. My Simple PayPal Donate WordPress plugin is quite popular and in all the code examples I use my details. I suspect someone has implemented it with my details by mistake and this person was attempting to donate elsewhere. None-the-less, it would have been my details (including site address) that would have appeared during this process.