Can people look my primary email up from my secondary one?

[grumpycakes]

I'm going to be using a secondary email for clients to send me money. Is it possible for someone to look up my primary email from the secondary one I'm giving them to use? I'd rather they not have my primary email.

[PayPal_Andy]

Hi grumpycakes -

That is a great question, thanks for coming here to the Community for answers.

If they're making a payment to a secondary, confirmed email address on your account I'm not aware of any way that they would be able to see the primary email address you have listed on your account. If you're concerned about this type of thing happening I'd recommend running a test payment with someone (family, friend, etc) to see how it turns out. But I think you should be fine. 🙂

- Andy

[bryanduane]

PPandy, I sent a money request for a craigslisted item. They returned the fake emails back to my primary email, which I never divulged to them. They obviously got it from PP. They wanted me to send them $900+$100 via WU in order for them to send  the $7500 into my PP acct (which was $1000 more than the list price) then they would 'release the funds'. They requested no: ph contact, photos, shipping directions, never even mentioned the 'item' at all. Wow! this had scam written all over it, man ! Question is : PP trying to do anything about it? Giving them my primary email suggest 'inside job' scamming does it not? ....bryan

[PayPal_AdamD]

Hi bryanduane - This is always a frustrating situation. I am glad to hear that you caught this. One needs to be careful out there. PayPal would never ask your to use a different money processor such as Western Union, as we are pretty much in the same business. Were these emails that you were sent stating that they were from PayPal asking you to send money this way? If so, we would suggest that you forward them, and any other suspicious email that you ever receive stating that it is from PayPal, to spoof@paypal.com. This way we can take a look into where they are coming from and put a  stop to it.

- Adam

[MzLiz]

RE: The reply going to your primary email.

Either of these 2 things would cause an incoming email to show up in your primary email account.

Could your 2nd email be set to forward incoming mail to the primary address?

Or, that you've added a CC to your 2nd email's incoming router, so it keeps the original message in the 2nd account, but also sends a copy to your primary?

Either of those things will make it appear as though the sender has your primary address, when they really don't.  It's just settings on your email.

That's such a creepy feeling, finding personal information where it shouldn't be  =p