Very Impressed with PayPal (at the moment...)

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Posted: Thu Jan 10, 2008 1:13 am

Like everyone else, I'm used to receiving an endless stream of phishing emails from someone claiming to be from PayPal.

When I tried to use the service earlier today, I realised one of the emails must have been genuine. PayPal locked my account shortly before Christmas based on activity they noted on 21 December. When I logged in and emailed them in a separate window, I got a response back within two hours giving me the same case number in the original email

To restore my account, I had to go through a separate three-step process (including an automated telephone call to my home 45 SECONDS after receiving an email with a security code to enter Shocked

) PayPal pisses me off from time-to-time but I can't fault their security.

I'm jaded by scams, but I'll take more care from now on to check headers and recipient names before I discard some emails as phishing.

.

Posted: Thu Jan 10, 2008 3:24 am

Funny, this happened to me too. When I pursued it to find out why they'd locked my account, I got an email back saying this:

Quote:

The actions of the third party who may have accessed your PayPal account indicate they may have attempted to download unauthorized software on your computer in order to access further information.

We strongly encourage you to take steps to secure all of the computers you use to access PayPal. Please be careful to check all computers used to access PayPal. We recommend that you check computers at home and at work if you ever sign in to PayPal from those locations. This means making sure your computer system and virus protection software are regularly updated.

Check with the manufacturer of your computer for information on updating operating systems and web browsers. If you do not own virus protection software, there are several products available from companies such as McAfee, Norton, Trend Micro, and Symantec. PayPal does not endorse any of these companies and does not in any way guarantee their products'
performance; however, we strongly encourage all members to use virus protection software and to update it regularly.

I still don't know why they thought my account was compromised, because my password still worked and there were no transactions in the account that I hadn't done myself...and we do have anti-virus software. But I went ahead and changed the password anyway. I'm glad that Paypal is looking out for us, I guess!

Posted: Thu Jan 10, 2008 4:07 am

Fortunately for me, the originating email was fairly simple. In essence it said:

a) you're locked
b) if you want to restore, here's whay you do

No link. No nothing; just log in separately and follow the instructions (after their separate email), I did.

Posted: Thu Jan 10, 2008 12:07 pm

@Cachuma

I wonder if PayPal had detected someone entering a chunk of your account name/password then continually logging in trying to get the rest?

I obviously don't know what AV you have, but don't forget that some pure AV solutions don't detect spyware like keyloggers, trojans, etc. There are some good freebies out that will, though

Elite Baiter Joined: 02 Jul 2006 Posts: 1702

Yea it does have to be said if paypal hear about fraud of any kind they do jump on it, but the other problems people have take days to sort out.

If a legitimate business was using paypal - having the account locked in error could be catestrophic, i had problems just because some webdesigner made a field missing, took till the following monday to sort out - obviously paypal web staff dont work weekends. But for a business thats 48hrs of lost trade - in my case it was just inconvienient, i had other means to achieve what i needed to do.

But in response yes paypal are good at dealing with fraud or suspected fraud very quickly.

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