PAYPAL and Debit Card Fraud
 

I want to put this out here for those of you that might not be aware of something I discovered
by accident a few days ago while making an online purchase.
for this online purchase there was a button to pay with PAYPAL which I do quite often as I have a Paypal Account.
I want to make a very strong point here.
when ever I shop or pay bills online I always open a separate window to do so and close it;
REMEMBERING to always sign out
and reopen another one for each of these things I deal with.
So getting back to what I discovered was after that purchase I had to go to Paypal for something and it SHOCKED me that I did not have to log in.
What I am assuming is that when you click that Paypal button you go thru all the whatever and sign into your Paypal Account to make that purchase BUT it never signs you out.
THAT MEANS your Paypal Account is floating OPEN on the internet.
when you make these online purchase and are done with them
IMMEDIATELY go open your paypal account and close it for privacy reasons.

This morning I woke up to 3- emails telling me that there were 3- debit card purchases
made from my Paypal account while I slept.
the account was drained of almost $1,500.00.
yes it was turned over to the fraud dept.

I don't feel the two things are connected but you never know.
There was a reason I discovered that the Paypal account was still open after purchases.
Please just be aware of this.

WOW very good information ! I do hope you can recover your funds. Let us know how this works out. It will be interesting how paypal handles this .

Thank you for the heads up. I haven't used paypal in years and prefer to write a check. I don't know if sending a check is really any safer but I do know our credit union will help if there is a problem.

I wonder if that's how hackers got my profile. We had two of our three credit cards hacked at 4:30am one morning. The only place both were hooked up online were PayPal and Amazon. Amazon had a third card of ours that was not hacked, so we think it was the PayPal profile that did us in. I bet this was how the hackers got our credit card info. We called PayPal to report it, but customer service reps must not be paid much as the rep insisted PayPal could not have been the source since we did not have any fraudulent activity on our PayPal account. (sigh)

I am definitely going to close browsers after using PayPal now!!! And formally log out of PayPal!

I am at the Paypal website almost every day and it does not stay open. If there is no activity after 5-10 minutes you will be logged out. I think the website you were at may have been fraudulent. Are you sure the PP site where you did not have to log in was the real thing? Scammers have ways of re-directing you when you are trying to get to a legitimate website and you wind up on a fake look-alike site.

The website I was at was not fradulant.
I buy from them them all the time.

ok just got off phone with Paypal regarding this.
she is making a report because they have never had anyone bring it
to their attention before.
she also stated that Paypal is set to TIME OUT in 5 mns.
strange thing about that is that my paypal account was open the so
I could get their phone #
and sat idle for the 11 mins. I talked to her and
IT NEVER TIMED OUT !!

Good tips. Another thing to point out is to never go to PayPal through a link in your email. Always go to the browser and manually type it in. I've received many in the past that very closely resembled a PayPal address, but not quite. Usually you can hover over the sender name and check it out. The ones I got were from PayPall...with 2 "l's".

Another thing people may not realize they have is a Trojan Horse virus called Keylogger or something similar. It records your keystrokes and sends them back to whoever infected your pc. Use an anti-virus and keep it updated! I know people who load it in their system and never update...not much point in that!

I noticed some time ago that, when I bought something on ebay and pd thru PP, it appeared there was no logout from the ebay/PP transaction. I went into PP and was still logged in. So I've started going to PP right after I do the ebay transaction and log out. I didn't know it was supposed to time out and would be afraid to give it a chance to do so. I'd think ebay would set it up so that when the transaction was finished, you'd be automatically logged out of PP.

remember to close out your browser and open a new one for other things.