PayPal Community

Hi all, This is an old problem, but the last time I pursued it Paypal support told me to pound sand. I decided to give it another go.   I have an early hotmail email address that is short/simple enough that many people have randomly guessed it as a throw away address when signing up for things. It's usually not a problem because email verification stops them cold.   However, early Paypal didn't require email to be verified. In fact, someone in Germany is still using their paypal.de account with my email address. They did this before I created my Paypal account, so I use another email address. I still get messages from Paypal about what this other person is doing (e.g. a ~$500 unpaid Binance invoice). I have no way to recover the account. Just having the email account isn't enough. Year ago, this second factor was security questions, and now it requires SMS text. I don't know this person, and I certainly don't have their +49 cell phone. Either way, I can't close the account myself.   This is a minor form of identity theft.   You might think just telling Paypal about this would be enough, but they didn't lift a finger. Maybe things are different. I want this account closed. No one should be able to create a login using a fraudulent email address. How would you pursue this?   Steve. ... View more

Hi all, I have an email address that is easy to guess, so very often random people on the internet enter it into webforms as a bogus address (bogus to them, but it's my real address). It's a common 5 letter word at a common domain, thus the issue.   Several years ago when I created this email address, I tried to register it with Paypal. Turns out someone else already tried to fraudulently create a Paypal.de (German Paypal) account with that address. Of course they couldn't finish the process because they couldn't receive email at that address. You might think that after a certain number of weeks or months, this account creation might be cancelled, and I can get my email address back. But NO, it's been several years now, and Paypal.de is still waiting on the account owner to login and complete the process. I've tried to recover the password of the account and kill it myself, but in addition to the password I also need to answer a security question. No dice.   I tried to fix this several years ago when I discovered the issue, but the customer service reps were initially unable to comprehend the problem and then unwilling to fix it. I'm back for round 2.... How should I proceed with this? Thanks for the advice! ... View more