Starting at the beginning . . .  .

My Cell phone battery has been getting weaker and weaker.  So last Monday night, I went online looking for a replacement battery.  I found the battery that I wanted on eBay, but I didn’t have enough money in my PayPal account to purchase the battery.  So last Tuesday morning, (Sept 30^th 08) when I arrived here at work, I logged onto PayPal to request that $100.00 be transferred from my Checking account into my PayPal account.  I have always felt that PayPal was the safest way to send money over the internet, but still took additional precautions such as not allowing any automatic transfers from my credit cards, or my bank accounts.  In hindsight, this saved me major headache, but didn’t save me entirely.  Let me explain . . . .

Because I don’t have automatic transfer of funds set up within my account, I had to wait until everything cleared.  This usually requires a waiting period of three - four days.  Of course, during this time, PayPal sends my confirmation emails so that if something is unauthorized, I have time to inform them so that they can intervene. Friday afternoon, I got the email from PayPal telling me that the Transfer was complete.  When I got this email, I was visiting my daughter in another city and didn’t react to the information.  My plan was to order the battery Sunday night. 

Sunday morning I woke up and picked up my phone to check my emails.  I had about 7 different emails from PayPal, and the subject line on several was “You Sent Money”.  I knew that I had not sent any money to anyone, so I quickly grabbed my laptop and logged onto my PayPal account.  It informed me that my account had been limited due to suspicious activity.  Now there is much that has taken place since that moment that I won’t go into . .  Just know that my stress level has been hyper-high since I read that first email from PayPal Sunday morning.  PayPal has promised me that everything that was transferred will be 100% refunded and as I write this, $300 of the $1250 total has been resolved!

 I called PayPal this morning to clarify a few things and the guy told me that I did everything correct!  Well, if I did everything correctly, why was my account compromised in the first place????  I will probably never know all the details but here are a few things I do know:

·         My account was certainly accessed by someone else.  The only recent activity that had taken place on my account by me was when I requested that $100 be transferred and that was from an Eastman computer.  I would think that security would be higher on these computers then it would have been on mine from home, but maybe these are just a larger target???  I don’t know . . . .  I do know that I haven’t clicked on any emails recently from PayPal asking me to update information, etc.  . . . .

·         The fact that I DID NOT have automatic transfer of funds set up was the red flag to PayPal!  To set up automatic funds be withdrawn from checking or credit cards requires approval through a landline telephone. When the person accessed my account and started withdrawing and sending money, he requested more than I had available and since this wasn’t approved, PayPal started “freezing any moneys that I was “requesting” that they send.  I am assuming that the hacker had set up several fictitious accounts to which to move my money.  Even though the names looked like common American names, several of the emails looked like they originated from China or the far east. 

·          Money was still moved from my checking account.  My Bank did freeze the last request for money to PayPal, but not until $750 had been transferred already! EVEN THOUGH this was never authorized by me, PayPal and my bank both still let these transactions go through!  This one has me mad at both PayPal and and my bank. Since this wasn’t authorized, the hacker should have only had access to $168.00  My wife works at our bank is taking the ball on this one . . . .

Even though everything is not yet totally resolved, I am confident that it will be.  To PayPal’s credit they have assured me that if I will give them a few days, they will have everything returned that was illegally obtained.  But as soon as they do, here are my next steps.

·         I am closing that PayPal account.  I have already changed my password, but as soon as everything is resolved, that account is closed and a new one will be opened.

·         I will create another new checking account dedicated only to PayPal.  This way, should this ever happen again, it won’t affect my main checking account.

·         I will not keep much money in my this new PayPal account!  Even though I have practiced this with my current account, it is even more evident now why this is important.  If I would have had $1000 in that account, the hacker could have accessed that money  and PayPal wouldn’t have suspected a thing since the hacker wasn’t asking for additional funds.

Again, with the Holidays quickly approaching, if you are like my wife and I, you will probably be more likely to purchase items over the internet.  We probably all know the rules and try our best to follow them.  In my case, I am tending to believe that someone hacked PayPal and the breech was not of my doing. . . Who knows if I clicked on something that I shouldn’t have?  I am very careful, consider myself extremely internet savvy and until Sunday morning, didn’t think it could happen to me . . . .

I am including a link to PayPal’s guide to staying safe online.  All of these tips also apply to banking.  Please be aware and be careful.   And if you have your PayPal account set up to automatically withdraw from your Checking, savings or Credit Card accounts, I would suggest you log on to PayPal immediately and have that feature removed . . . .

https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/cps/securitycenter/general/Index-outside

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.

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