A few days ago someone got into my paypal account. They changed the email, password, and phone number so I wasn't able to get into the account. I had my bank blacklist paypal (yay $30 fee thanks paypal for your terrible security measures) and put a fraud alert on my credit score. But otherwise I have had so much difficulty figuring out how to dispute the hard inquiry that dropped my credit score. Transunion's website is broken/poorly designed and won't let me get past the page that says "step 1 of 3" when I try to dispute the inquiry. I already reported it to the federal identity theft whatever whatever people. But paypal themselves should be able to contact the credit bureaus and tell them it was identity theft, no? Well I've been clicking through all the unhelpful links in the help center and there's nothing. No easily accessible way to contact paypal either. I mean the other day I had to message them on facebook and it accomplished nothing 🙄 and I just chatted with some automated chatbot that I'm sure will be so helpful. The other day I called the paypal phone # on the hard inquiry and it took me through some dumb automated recordings until I finally got "you can borrow up to $54,000, your current balance is $0 but this does not reflect transactions from the past 24 hours" and from there I was able to say "close my account" and I got confirmation that it was closed but who knows what they could have been buying in the meantime.
Oh and to make it better they used my original email to open a new paypal account with my name, so to recover this account I had to add my second email and confirm that to be able to remove the hacker's email.
Would love it if someone could actually help me get this fraudulent inquiry off my credit report, since I had to do everything else with nada help from paypal. And yes before anyone says it, I changed all my passwords, I took my debit card and bank off this account because once I get rid of this inquiry I'm deleting paypal and never associating with them again. I mean who lets an account apply for $54,000 in credit after changing the email, password, and phone number on the account in the span of like 1 minute?
