Prevent Paypal Express payments from a paypal email address

Payments + Shipping & Fulfilment

Topic summary

Merchant seeks a way to block PayPal Express payments from a specific PayPal email address, even when the buyer uses different Shopify emails. They report repeated fraud where the Shopify email changes but the PayPal account email stays the same, and they can’t find a way in Shopify to identify or block by the PayPal email.

Key constraints:

  • PayPal Express is processed off Shopify, so Shopify doesn’t expose controls to block by PayPal account email or reliably link it to the Shopify customer profile.

Suggested action:

  • Contact PayPal to explore blocking/reporting the specific PayPal account and to pursue fraud reporting, since PayPal holds the payer’s verified information.

Status/outcome:

  • No Shopify-side solution identified in the thread; recommendation is to handle the block/enforcement through PayPal. Discussion remains open with no confirmed resolution.
Summarized with AI on December 30. AI used: gpt-5.
1

I’ve got an interesting question. I’m curious to know if there’s a way to block a paypal payment from email address ‘A’, which is the paypal account email address, even though they use a different email address in shopify.

We’re incurring significant amount of fraud from a user who changes their shopify email address, but not the paypal account email address. We want to block these but it appears there’s no way to identify the account in shopify.

2

I don’t think so, because PayPal processing happens off Shopify.

Try contacting PayPal, it would be good to see if there’s a solution on that side + report a scammer. Since they have personal information about the person with the PayPal account, they may be able to report them properly.