I woke up one morning to check my bank statement to see if I had been paid what I should have by my employers. I saw on there 3 swipe rate £500 payments to PayPal which were not authorised by me. So naturally, I jumped straight on the phone to PayPal and after about half an hour, someone eventually picked up. I explained that the transactions were nothing to do with me, and the lady at the end of the phone refered the case onto their "fraud" team. I thought nothing more of it, and carried on with life...BIG mistake. After a few days, I recieved an email back from PayPal saying that the transactions were to Betfair (which I do use PayPal for) and nothing seems out of the ordinary. I said to them that they must have got something wrong, so I requested it be escalated to a higher level. The woman said back to me that because it was going to a higher level, it would have to be a manager that calls me back, which within the 3 months that this investigation took place, didn't happen, despite a good dozen phone calls back to PayPal to see when this call was supposed to happen. I also had been in touch with the Police and the Fraud squad, and had a crime reference number, but their investigations were the same as PayPals. In the meantime however, I had noticed that 5 other attempts to take money from my account had been tried, but I guess my bank must have declined them. This included a £3000, £4,500 and a £5,000 withdrawal, all going to Betfair again. Needless to say, I was onto Betfair straight away and they said it's a PayPal issue, all they could do was to close the account. Not helpful in the slightest. After a good few days, I decided to check back on the progress of my claim, and was horrified to see on the screen in front of me, in big red numbers "-£1500". I burst into tears almost instantly, and to add insult to injury, my bank balance was also "-£1500". I felt insanely low and didn't know what to do, if it wasn't for my parents and partner, I might have not been here today. Anyway, more calls were made and more manager Callbacks were requested, but still, nothing. I was £3000 in debt through no fault of my own. Depression soon turned to anger, and I couldn't take it anymore. So one evening I phoned PayPal up once more to get answers, but again ,nothing. I gave up about a week or so ago and just thought I'm gonna have to pay it, I have no choice but to. Then, the killer blow came...just last night, I had the dreaded debt collectors on the phone, demanding the money. I just hung the phone up on them in the hope they leave me alone. What I believe had happened is that some hacker has got hold of my EBay info in the big hack we had a couple of months back, and has paired the email address and password to PayPal and has gained access that way. Then they've seen what I've used PayPal for in the past and used the same username and password again (I used the same username and password on all my accounts, stupid me)
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