PayPal supposedly has a "refuse payment" button, but it works differently for "verified" and "unverified" accounts.
Now, if this was a bank to bank ACH transfer, the recipient could just refuse the credit. There's an error code for this situation: R10: “Customer Advises Originator is Not Known to Receiver and/or Originator is Not Authorized by Receiver to Debit Receiver’s Account”.[1]
You can contact your bank and refuse an incoming ACH transaction, which will generate this.
This is different from sending money back. It says to the banking system that the transaction was rejected and did not complete. So you're not sending the unknown originator your money. You're refusing to take their money. This eliminates the possibility of a reversal from their end costing you money. It also marks the transaction as an error in the banks at both ends. This is useful, because many errors on an account are an alarm condition and will get the attention of some fraud department.
If you have to reverse a transaction, do it fast. There are time limits for the simple paths.
(A friend of mine runs a bank branch of a major bank. Much of her day is spent straightening out error situations like this.)
[1] "https://www.nacha.org/rules/differentiating-unauthorized-ret...
Now, if this was a bank to bank ACH transfer, the recipient could just refuse the credit. There's an error code for this situation: R10: “Customer Advises Originator is Not Known to Receiver and/or Originator is Not Authorized by Receiver to Debit Receiver’s Account”.[1] You can contact your bank and refuse an incoming ACH transaction, which will generate this.
This is different from sending money back. It says to the banking system that the transaction was rejected and did not complete. So you're not sending the unknown originator your money. You're refusing to take their money. This eliminates the possibility of a reversal from their end costing you money. It also marks the transaction as an error in the banks at both ends. This is useful, because many errors on an account are an alarm condition and will get the attention of some fraud department.
If you have to reverse a transaction, do it fast. There are time limits for the simple paths.
(A friend of mine runs a bank branch of a major bank. Much of her day is spent straightening out error situations like this.)
[1] "https://www.nacha.org/rules/differentiating-unauthorized-ret...