Wanted to bring this up because I’m curious to see if anyone else has experienced anything similar.
A little while back I called paypal to resolve some customer service issue I’d been having. I used a phone number that I’d reached them at before and that same number had been recently referred to me by Merchant Technical Support. After the incident, I also saw that the number was listed on Paypal’s site as a point of contact.
I called and instead of being directed to customer support as usual, I was given a prompt that said (paraphrasing), “Paypal is sorry for the issues you’ve been having with your account so we’re offering you a $100 gift card to Walmart or Amazon. If you’d like to accept, press one to continue.”
So, I press it, thinking it’s on the up-and-up because, "It’s paypal." I get connected to these ladies in South Asia, and they ask me for my name and address so they can send the card. After I give them that information, they then tell me that I need to give my credit card information so they can charge a small processing fee for the giftcard to be sent out.
Paypal’s customer service is awful and sheisty, so there’s a part of me that thinks this might still be legitimate, but a larger part of me would never ever trust an employee of paypal with my credit card information over the phone so I tell them that they can take the fee out of my paypal account. The lady that I’m speaking to keeps insisting, “Miss, please provide your credit card information. It is only a one time fee,” until the point where she’s not just repeating herself but actually getting aggressive and borderline yelling. Eventually she hangs up on me.
After that, I start a support ticket for my original issue and mention the gift card, the phone number, and the weird exchange with the ladies. The person that I spoke to reiterated that I apparently DID have the correct number for paypal’s customer support. He also said that Paypal 100% never offers any cards like this. But the rest of his commentary on the exchange was the standard, circular copy paste about the issue being forwarded to the proper department for further review.
Personally, I automatically assumed I'd put the wrong number in or something (I know there's a fake number circulating on google), but it was definitely a number that I'd used to reach them before, and the guy from the ticket also confirmed the number. So, I don't get it?
Maybe all of the other customer service calls I'd previously made were fake? And they just pretended to be customer support to make the scam seem legitimate? And the number is on the official paypal site because someone incorporated it into internal documents because they googled for it instead of checking their contact information internally? Or maybe paypal changed contact info and scammers picked up this number?
The number in question is: [Removed. Phone #s not permitted] Googling it, you can still find it listed as a contact on paypal.com pages.
I would appreciate someone else's thoughts on this.
