Account hacked, and money stolen.. Paypal continues to close my case.

[wholesomejoe]

So, I've been a Paypal Business user since like 2013.. I use it to receive payments for my videography business. 

It is my sole source of income.

I've never had issues of any kind, until a week ago when I happened to check my app, and realized that over half of my balance of funds was gone all of a sudden.

I started to look at my transactions and saw a slew of "friends and family" money transactions to two different email addresses/names that I have no clue who they are, in varying amounts starting low and then getting increasingly higher. I never got any notification that this was happening, and before I noticed they had managed to send almost $1200 to these unknown email addresses with unverified accounts.

I should also note that every single one was a USD to EUR conversion, which I've NEVER had.. at any point, that alone should have been enough to say "hey, this probably isn't legit" but no.... apparently not.

So I call customer service and open up a case, report all of the fraudulent transactions. The agent makes it seem like it's a no brainer and they will refund it no problem. 24 hours goes by, and I notice my case is now closed.. They've denied it stating that the charges were not unauthorized. But, I.. the owner of the account, told you they WERE?  I need a little more info than that...

So, I call back and state my claim again.. this time the agent tells me.. "Yes, I totally see where you're coming from, this is out of the ordinary activity on your account.. let's appeal it." So, I'm like.. great.. maybe this time it will actually work.. 

24 hours later, I have email.. "Your case has been denied." 

He told me that they can see what IP or something (a long string of numbers) the transactions were made from, and they all appeared to be from the same place, but couldn't give me anymore detailed information than that.

I don't understand why this is all I'm getting when there's never even been so much as one EUR transaction in my account over the past 5 years, much less like 10 in the span of 3 days from UNVERIFIED EMAIL ADDRESSES.

I don't know what to do, I cannot afford to lose that much funds all at once.

[sharpiemarker]

@wholesomejoe 

Did they say the IP address matches the one you normally send from? You’ll have to do some research or ask a supervisor about IP numbers where is it possible that you can log in but register as different IP or it’s the same one. You can tell them you don’t recognize these names/email addresses. Also file an ic3.gov report.

[wholesomejoe]

He didn't seem too sure to be honest, he just said it was a long string of numbers that tells them where the transactions were made, and that they were all coming from the same "device?" I think is what he meant to say. He didn't seem particularly savvy in that department.  I already told them I don't recognize the names/email addresses, but their answer to that was "Well, that's really just your word against theirs." 

how do I file a ic3.gov report? Just got to that url?

[wholesomejoe]

I had to call again because I discovered even more transactions had been made using the same method, from a different unverified email address, this time in CAD instead of EUR.

I caught it this time before it was a ton of money, but still..

I ran mal-ware and virus scans on my only computer that logs into paypal, uninstalled the paypal app and changed all of my email and paypal passwords. I called again, to open yet another case.. this agent was more helpful than the last, and walked me through setting up 2 step authentication on pretty much all of my stuff, and I reset my password on literally every device and every thing I could possibly think of. He said, that they would look at more than just the IP, but that's the main thing they look at and why it keeps getting denied, because when they do that check it all appears to be coming from the same device, (it's not.. I'm not even awake when some of these transactions occurred.) I try to explain that there are multiple evidence to prove the transactions are not authorized. 1. I, the account owner is telling you they aren't. 2. The email addresses are unverified. 3. The currency is always a foreign currency, and there are literally no other transactions like them in all of my account for the past 7 years. Any Bank would have already flagged them as fraudulent, based on the information I already provided. Yet, they continue to close my cases, with nearly no explanation.

I've filed a fraud complaint as suggested, and have tried to contact Paypal on social media, since sometimes that seems to be the only way to get companies to listen to you.

[Maplemangler]

Hi Joe. 

I'm interested if you ever had a resolution for this. I've been through the same sort of thing recently, though I reported the transactions while they were still pending and the customer service rep lied to me saying it would be cancelled. Then they took the money out of my account and when I appealed the resolution centre said it was authorised. 

It's sad because I use if for payments for other services, and also my ebay account. It seems like Paypal is not concerned with stopping the facilitation of fraud, and now I have my bank investigating.