Unknown contacts in send money friends and family

[bjcolbert]

I've seen this question asked in the archives but always with the wrong answer. Here it is again. 

When I go to transfer money using friends and family a bunch of icons show up that were not there before for people that are not in my contacts and do not show up in my address book in Paypal. So the question is who are these people and how did they get there and how to get rid of them.  The usual wrong answer I've seen is go to tools then settings/address book. The problem as stated above is these people do not show up in the address book so I can't delete them from there. So again, who are they? Are they just scammers who hope I'm going to make a mistake and send them money? More troubling is how did they get there. Has my Paypal account been compromised in some way? They only person I know in this list is the one with the palm trees and the same name as me. This is very disconcerting. Paypal doesn't seem to be aware of the problem or have a way to remove them. 

Any suggestions? 

[AlanM1]

My wife is worried this has just happened to her account. There is now an icon with the name of someone that she doesn't recognise and has had no dealings with. How did it get there and how does she remove it?!

[Bruce_Fraser]

@AlanM1

Re: How did it get there and how does she remove it?!

How it got there is a bit of a mystery; one of my posts above had one suggestion.

How to remove it: this has already been answered in this thread. See the post by kernowlass.

[dftormey]

I have noticed this only last night also. I now feel my account is compromised and will probably shut it down as I have not seen any positive reply from PayPal, indicating why

[Blimblam]

I didn't look yet for proper and correct replies, but I just opened a PayPal account and when I clicked on "sync contacts" it populated with way too many people. It seems that not only does it populate with your contacts list, but goes into your phone call history and matches phone numbers to other PayPal users!!! Guess I didn't read the fine print, but I would think that is reaching a bit far into my privacy. No reasonable person would think that is acceptable.