The wonderful Tortoise has helped jog something in my head that I should have thought of before.
Here is the theory
We know that Dan was granted 3rd party developer rights for Joey's Paypal account.
What I think this means is that website can login to Paypal via the API to process transactions - like a new payment - using Dan's login, but sending the money to Joey's EIP account. My understanding is that you do this so you can grant your dev more limited rights to run your e-commerce, without the dev having your master login and thus access to all the crown jewels.
So whereas humans login to a website like paypal via a webpage, when machines communicate with each other over the internet, they do so via an access point called an
API . So in the present case, Dan has added a shopping cart to the EIP website. A customer fills in their credit card. The website then uses a "payment gateway" where by it connects to paypal which is going to process the payment and report back to the shopper whether the web payment was successful. What happens in the background is that the EIP website logs on to paypal to send the credit card data over the API. Paypal then does its thing, takes the money, and tells the website what happened. It seems likely to me that this stuff was happening using Dans login. That's why Joey granted him developer rights.
so.... are these regular logins happening over the API rather than a human login?
Because if they are, the IP address shown would always be the IP address of the website rather than Dan's locational IP
If the site was hosted in San Diego and had a fixed IP - this could well explain why "Dans IP" always shows up there as far as Paypal is concerned, even as he was making daily purchases in Hawaii.
It would also explain why Dan is logging in so often.
What might not fit with this theory is Dan's payment request just after the 4th unless he could also generate these via the website?
I wonder if Joey and Dan had sales reporting on the backend of the site, and this is how Dan made the requests based on splits....
my .02c