How to tell if your account has been hacked

[dmarkmclain]

Greetings all, I have had my Paypal account for 7 years now. Suddenly, on Dec. 31, 5 transactions appeared, 4 of which were money coming IN to the account, and one taking money out for a purchase. I use my account STRICTLY as a method of payment for E-Bay. Two of the transactions have been disputed and I have been in touch with the person whose money was deposited. He informed me that his debit card had been stolen and he has lost $1650.00 in the process.

My question is this: It seems as though my account has been breached or hacked. I don't sell anything on the internet, yet this money has been deposited in my account. Who do I need to contact to get this situation resolved as soon as possible? Thanks for any help you can give me on this, I pretty worried about the security of my info!

[BigKahuna97]

I would start by downloading this program to check for any key-loggers on your pc. http://www.malwarebytes.org/

If this program comes up with a ton of entries you more than likely had a key-logger installed on your pc so the hacker had pp info and any other info you physically typed in on your keyboard including bank information if you do home banking.

After you run this program try re-changing all passwords again as the key-logger would have sent the new passwords to the hacker.

Take Care

P.S.

This program is free.

[dmarkmclain]

OK, I'll do that right away. However, you should probably know that I haven't even logged in to the account for quite some time, probably a year or more. All of the transactions occured just 5 days ago! This is what really has me worried. How can someone have my account info when I haven't used it in so long?

[BigKahuna97]

That is confusing to say the least.  Any chance you used the same password on paypal for the e-mail address linked tot he pp account?  If you have certain tracking viruses on your PC you would not need a keystroke or keylogger but instead anytime you opened outlook or outlook express the packet data would be forward to the hacker which would include pop3, smtp, and full login credentials.  

My rule of thumb with passwords is this:

An 8 character password can be cracked in a matter of hours using the right software. A 20+ character password will typically take so long to crack the hacker would move on to another victim.  While it is annoying to enter it does end up paying off in the long run.

[dmarkmclain · Accepted solution]

Interesting, but I opened the account from a Macintosh computer some 7 years ago. I do not typically use a PC except at work, and my email password is very different from my personal password. I haven't noticed any unusal activity within my bank account, and I have been rather dilligent with keeping it checked since all of this began last week. However, I will change the password for my personal email address to be on the safe side, and I suppose I should do the same for my online banking too.

I appreciate your input very much and I will wait to see what info I get from Paypal customer support.

Thanks!

[delphie58]

Probably nothing much.  I had this happen Jan 13, 2011, a deposit of $100 (echeck)  from a woman who turned out not to have sent it, her information was used, and Paypal removed the item.  The same day, my bank purported to send $50 to my account at Paypal for no reason, I didn't authorize it.  Both of these items had a hold until Jan 19, 2011 before I would receive the money in Paypal.  I hear that the deal is for Paypal to request money to be sent to my account several days before a transfer, not on the 13th, and therefore my bank then had no record of any attempt by them to send money to Paypal, scary.  I am waiting to see if Paypal does request it on the $50 item.  In the meantime, I have changed my Paypal password AND gotten a new bank account.  And the time I had trying to explain to customer service reps was awful.  I finally got hold of Paypal's Limitations Department and she advised me to ask my bank to place a stop payment order and something called an ACH return (the bank would know what she meant).  My bank has done this.  So far the account is 00 which it should be.  What is the object of fraudulently trying to send money to your account?  Are they (who are they) waiting to see if we deposit it, and then a "tag" on it gives them all my bank information?  Nobody at Paypal can tell me what the purpose of this maneuver really is?  Was I hacked?  Help!