@PayPal_david wrote: Hi there Lumpfish67, Although the PayPal website is very safe and secure, unauthorised transactions can happen from time to time . There are a few possible ways as to how this could have happened. Firstly, there could have been a virus or other malicious software present on your home computer that has resulted in your email address and password being sent to someone that has accessed your PayPal account. Another possible reason is that you may have responded to a spoof or fraudulent email and this could have also provided your login information to a person who has accessed your PayPal account. If you have updated the password on your PayPal account, you should also do a full scan for viruses in order to determine if there is any malicious software present. If there is, you should be advised of this when you are completing the scan and your anti-virus software will also delete it. I will answer your questions in the order that you asked them: Has this happened to anyone else? I would not be able to check and see if this has happened to anyone else. It could have been the case that the person the payment was sent to has no awareness of the payment and they have nothing to do with this unauthorised usage of your account. How could this happen? I have answered this previously above. How did the transaction go through if the money didn't come out of the account it said it did? The only reason that I can think of is that the payment was sent using a confirmed bank account on your PayPal account. If this was the case, your bank will not receive notification of the payment for between 2 and 3 working days from when the payment was sent from your account. What other personal information of mine could now be compromised? Even if you go to your PayPal account and then to the credit/debit cards section, you will only ever seee the last four digits of the card that is registered on your account. That is what makes the PayPal website so secure. None of your account information is ever visible to anyone through the PayPal website. The bank account that the money supposedly came from had only just been added and confirmed (with the two little deposits). Could this have anything to do with it? If this bank account is your bank account, it would take the 2 to 3 working days as I advised above. If your bank can refuse the payment, it will prevent the funds from being taken from your bank account. I hope this informaiton helps, David. Hi David Thanks for your reply. Update on the case: Its all now sorted out but its been a right palaver from start to finish. I ended up with a negative paypal balance because the amount got credited back to my account (apparently this was done in error) so my subsequent purchases got taken out of it before it was reversed. (confused? - I was):smileyindifferent: I spent a lot of time and energy on this - all because of some little toerag scammer. I've needed to call paypal three or four times over the last week to sort it all out and make sense of it. Paypal were great and most helpful but the whole experience has been a nightmare. I've done some further research myself and found that full instructions are available for anyone who wants to hack paypal. Something about tricking the mailer bot. So people are clearly trying to hack into unsuspecting account holders. I think I must have been a victim of this as I have never responded to any emails. I know how to spot a spoof. I'm always wary and careful as I work in IT so am aware of phishing etc. My advice to others would be to either invest in the paypal security token (which I have done out of paranoia - £20 mind you is a bit steep) or only use a prepay debit card in your paypal account and only load it up when you want to pay for something. That way they can hack all they want but they won't get anything. I feel like I've had a lucky escape as there wasn't enough in my account for the fake transaction to go through. I feel sorry for anyone who's been caught out and actually lost money. Again thanks for your reply I hope this is helpful to others too.
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