What does "Get more details in your Paypal China account" mean?

[mcm9110]

I was recently looking to reprint a shipping label as my printer didnt print it, and saw a link that says, "Get more details in your Paypal China account" -- I have never seen this before and I dont have any accounts in China.

[Carpen14]

"I can say this link does direct to a PayPal webpage," Can you say what the content of that web page is/was please?

It would give me some comfort knowing what I clicked on (stupidly) yesterday wasn't a hacked link.

Until I know, I won't be very happy.

[TempOcto2022]

Thank you for this and yes, when I finally reach a person from support, they also confirmed that it is a 'known issue.' 

But this is serious enough to warrant a more detailed explanation. 

(1) Why was any withdraw  link at all showing up on each transaction? Paypal has always had a 'transfer' option where users can withdraw funds from their balance and Paypal China - the real site - has this too. To have the option to withdraw each transaction individually makes no sense and does not exist in the standard PP framework. 

(2) The link goes to paypa.cn not paypal.cn - A Who.Is search for that domain reveals it is not a Paypal domain, not even a bizarrely named staging site. What is the explanation for this please? 

(3) Is there a developer-level explanation of this "bug" on the dev page? It is not showing up that I can see. 

(4) Browser inspect tools show the link as a "Go Pay" link - Paypal acquired the Chinese company GoPay - officially Guofubao Information Technology, apparently a subsidiary of the Chinese Ministry of Commerce - recently. While the advantages to Paypal of being - quoting Reuters -"the first foreign operator with 100% control of a payment platform in China" are clear, is it possible that the platforms have somehow merged? If so, what are the implications to Paypal users from America and Australia? I mention those countries as these are the two territories I know of experiencing this "bug." 

(5) Or, given that the paypa.cn is not a domain registered to Paypal or Go Pay - at least, not obviously - but a "Pan Jiaxin" and hosted on an Ali Baba cloud server, is it possible that another organization or entity has breached the system and if so, what are the implications to existing Paypal users? 

(6) If this is, as Paypal support are saying to some people, a "cosmetic" issue - can you please explain how that could occur? Cosmetic issues are usually when a CSS error displays the wrong font or an image obscures some words etc, it suggests design. But this is a link illogically appearing on every individual transaction item which does not link to a Paypal site -in what way would you call it 'cosmetic'?[Removed. Phone #s not permitted]ubsidiary of a foreign government - see above? - and if so, how does this alter merchant agreements which do not, as far as I know, mention this fact? What access does GoPay aka Guofubao Information Technology have to legacy PayPal accounts and data please? The terms of the agreement between Paypal and GoPay have not been disclosed so this is unclear. 

[jess-stjames]

I don't buy for one single millisecond that this wasn't caused by a breach, and frankly I'm infuriated that support is lying to customers about it.

• The link does not lead to a PayPal website. That's just a blatant, flat-out lie from support. According to whois.com, the linked website (paypa.cn) is registered under the name of a Chinese company with a random gibberish email ([redacted]). The official paypal.cn website is registered with a paypal.com email.
• The link is always a "paypa.cn/withdraw" link, even if the transaction you're looking at is a payment sent instead of received. That makes no sense. You can't withdraw money that has been sent.
• As another user has pointed out, this is not a "cosmetic issue". This isn't a browser glitch causing some page elements to display incorrectly. A link to an unknown Chinese website claiming to be an official PayPal website is being injected onto every single transaction page. This is serious [redacted] and I cannot believe that support has the audacity to outright lie to people who are concerned about this.

As of today (2022-10-05) PayPal phone support cannot be contacted, and neither can messaging/text support. What is going on??? It seems to me like all support has been taken offline because they know something extremely serious has happened and they're in emergency mode trying to coordinate their PR response.

[rimmsel]

@PayPal_JonK , could you please elaborate on why the link "does direct to a PayPal webpage," yet the url is "paypa.cn" which is not the correct PayPal China URL, and additionally has been taken down and is no longer accessible? Those are not hallmarks of a legitimate PayPal webpage, and the fact that the link out to this site is still available from the transactions page is very concerning. Something about this situation isn't adding up and the fact that support has been so evasive about the legitimacy of the link is very worrying and makes me think PayPal is lying about the severity of the situation. Can we please have an update directly acknowledging whether or not there has been a security breach which adds this link to the transaction page?

[Carpen14]

I'll repeat what I was told by a Paypal rep. a couple of days ago. He said an employee made an error.

I asked why it has taken days to fix it if an employee made a mistake and pointed out that the link

was very suspicious, "Paypa.cn"

He assured me that it was nothing to worry about and gave me a case number. I am very concerned

because I stupidly clicked on the link.

[PayPal_JonK]

@jess-stjames, @rimmsel, @Carpen14, 

Hi again everyone!!

Thank you @jess-stjames for pointing out that it is a paypa.cn and not a paypal.cn link, I had missed that. With that in mind, I have confirmed again, at the present moment, this is still believed to be a cosmetic issue and not a breach or phishing tactic. If you're concerned about Safeguarding your account, please refer to the link I posted above. 

I can certainly understand how concerning this is, and our teams are working diligently to implement a resolution as soon as possible.

As far as our Customer Support teams are concerned, they are still open, operational, and can be reached where available by phone, chat, Twitter DM, and Facebook PM. 

Thank you all for your time and input on this. If anything new that I can share arises on this, I'll make sure to update this thread accordingly.

 - Jon K

[cbpulse]

@Carpen14  can you make payment form your paypal account? I also clicked the link out of curiosity and now I am unable to make any payment from my PayPal account. It asks me for a "quick security verification" asking to add a phone number but after entering the phone number which I already have under my account, it says unable to verify it's me and gives me phone numbers to contact customer service. I am now unable to make any payment whatsover using PayPal.

[dhaese]

Why am I seeing a link to PayPal China on my transaction details page? I don't have a China Account. I asked in the message center but, they just told me to clear my cache and ended the conversation. 

Anyone? Thanks

[Esinem1]

It goes to PayPa.cn not PayPal. I was told it was a bug but the rep agreed with me that it sounded much more like a hack.

A friend posted this on Facebook:

Paypal regarding using its UK users details to open accounts in China........ "Thank you for contacting PayPal regarding this and I can assure you that it has now been escalated urgently to our internal Fraud Team.".. Great now retrieve all my data from the CCP cheers...

[cbpulse]

Something strange is going on, PayPal is asking me to confirm if I did a transaction on ebay, even though I replied I did, they keep sending me the same text message every hour. I have never had this conformation being requested before.