If she didn’t have a PayPal account she would have had to use a credit card. She should file a dispute with her credit card company.

NO, this has all the earmarks of a scam.

If you send them their money back, I believe that this will happen:

Soon after reimbursing them, your bank will realize that the initial deposit was a fraud. But your reimbursement was not. Therefore, you will loose your money that you "sent back", and the bank will at the same time remove their phony deposit from your account.

My advice is to ignore everything and wait for the bank to remove their "mistake".
In a year or two if that deposit still shows in your account, then I'd withdraw it and keep or spend it.

There should have been a way to refuse the money in the beginning.

Scammers are laundering stolen cash through money transfer apps, the Better Business Bureau (BBB) reported.

App users receive payments that can be several hundred dollars from an unknown account.

The user is then contacted by the account holder who claims they sent the money “by accident” and request the money be sent back.

The BBB says in some cases the initial payment came from a stolen credit card. When the money is returned the scammer replaces the information from the stolen card with their legitimate account information.

Since the initial payment was stolen, the card owner may become aware and cancel the payment, meaning that amount of money will be removed from your account.

Not sure there is one. Don’t think there’s a way to find out any information on the stolen credit card so we can’t contact the cc company. If there’s a way for PayPal to find out they should be doing that. The company of the stolen card should know where it was used and contact PayPal once they are aware the card had been stolen. That’s if the owner of the card reports their last legit transaction on the card.

that, to me, is the weird thing about it. are you missing rent from any tenants? i'd start there, & ask each 1 how they paid

You cannot be defrauded if you do not have an account with PayPal.
Your mother must have used a CC or bank card.

Let paypal or the money sender straighten it out. Not your problem. Dont take the chance its a scam. Let it just sit there and see what happens. Its their alleged mistake so let them deal with paypal. Not you

PayPal is not a bank. How do you loose money?

It sounds like you are being used as the victim of a scam, or as a pawn in a scam. I would document your correspondence with PayPal, remove the money from the account, and never send another email to the person who sent the money to you. If you receive any other correspondence from the sender, forward it to Pay Pal. You may also want to close the PayPal account and open a new account.

Get the local sheriff Dept involved they will solve it for you but do not communicate as it’s most likely a scam and want your account information

In my own way enjoy driving them crazy.

Amazing when they call and say the call is being recorded for my protection. Those calls get hung up on real quick.

I believe the do not do anything let the money just sit there for a year or two is the winner.

Its a scam. Dont do it unless you can identify the person. You will send it back than they will dispute the amount sent you on their end and pay osl will deduct funds. So they get your money and you end up with paying out something you no longer have.

PayPal is linked to your bank or CC.
Any money moved out of your PP account comes from one of those linked accounts.

I would tell you're local sheriff only because this sounds like a scam. They would be able to talk you through it. One of my neighbors just got ripped off by another scam that is going around. Or if this is for real, someone will let the person know that they never received the rent and that person will report it. Just don't use that amount of money that was put into your account and make records of who you called when you realized it.

Deduct from bank account or credit card. So perv’s don’t get you’re bank account or credit card number.

No! Been a PayPal user since day 1. PayPal is still not a bank.

Never said it was a bank.
You asked how you can lose money from your Paypal account.
I answered your question.

Absolutely hold on. I am not familiar with this scam, but it sounds like others that are well known. I believe that when you posted three weeks ago, someone said that you should contact the senior crimes section of the PD. I would start there.

I might be missing something here, but why don’t you just click on the refund button. If it was sent to you by mistake, just send it back.

You can always click on the name of the sender and it has a refund button on it. Then the money will send back to the sender. I use Paypal everyday .