Today my wife called the PayPal support phone number believing she was locked out of her account, and was told by a man who could barely speak English that she needed to download the appdesk app from the IOS App Store and give PayPal remote access to her phone, then PayPal asked her to go on Amazon and buy a PlayStation gift card while PayPal watched the numbers (PayPal said they would send her a cancellation code for the transaction afterwards), and that’s when I stopped her, asking her if she was really speaking to PayPal…but she was! It was the PayPal number shown on the PayPal website, which was programmed into her phone [Removed. Phone #s not permitted]. This WASN’T a number that came from a google search result for PayPal phone numbers, and it WASN’T a phone number that came from a text message or email purportedly from PayPal. [Removed. Phone #s not permitted]came from PayPal’s own website. I stopped my wife from buying the PlayStation gift card on Amazon while PayPal watched her because I didn’t think PayPal had any reason to use a Remote Desktop app and certainly had no reason to ask my wife to buy a gift card while they watched (so they could view the gift card numbers, and spend the gift card). When I objected, saying PayPal had no legitimate reason to use a Remote Desktop app, PayPal claimed that app desk was not a Remote Desktop app, which is a lie. While she was following the instructions from PayPal, PayPal was viewing everything she was doing, which is how PayPal knew to say “Now swipe this way, and go up, and go down, go over here, open that up, go over there.” PayPal could not have issued the instructions it did without remote access to her phone. When I objected to PayPal asking her to buy a gift card on Amazon, PayPal kept saying that there was nothing to worry about: the conversation was being recorded by them and a cancellation code would be sent to my wife after the purchase. What a crock of crap. Meaningless assurances! I know that gift cards are the scam of choice nowadays because they can be spent anywhere across the world without consequence. I myself got scammed out of $500 after being tricked by scammers into buying gift cards from someone I thought was my employer (who deposited money into my account, and unbeknown to me that money was stolen from someone else’s account and which was hacked, and I had to pay back the bank). The bottom line is this: I think PayPal has some scammers on the inside, working within. Maybe that is why PayPal accounts belonging to real, actual people are currently be sold on the dark web on pages titled “PayPal World.” Those criminals claim to have obtained this info from malware recording keystrokes on people’s computers. But what if it the simplest explanation—that PayPal has been infiltrated—is the correct explanation (Occam’s Razor)? How else would PayPal explain what I observed today?
