I got a PayPal invoice for a purchase I never made — is it real?

The invoice is real — the purchase isn't. Scammers abuse PayPal's own invoicing tool, so the email genuinely comes from paypal.com and sails past spam filters: the fake order details and a “call to cancel this charge” phone number hide in the invoice's notes field, and that number connects you to the scammer, not PayPal. Never call the number in an invoice, and never pay one you don't recognize. Log into PayPal yourself — if there's no matching activity in your account, report the invoice inside the app and delete it.

Educational verdict from documented scam patterns — not a live report. For a 0–100 risk score on the exact link in your hand, run the checker.

From the research desk — this pattern is one of those documented in This Week's Scam Wave, in Numbers — August 2, 2026 →