Like most people who buy stuff on ebay or half.com, I use PayPal for all my transactions. Every now and then I get a spoof email claiming to be from PayPal (there are lots of ways to tell it's not, starting with "Dear PayPal User" instead of my name), and I send those in to PayPal. But yesterday I got an authentic-looking email from them saying that they've received my request to link to a new bank account. HUH?! I dashed to my PayPal account and found two large deposits made and then withdrawn, all under someone else's name! Yikes! I thought my heart had stopped. I called PayPal right away, and they've frozen my account, I've changed my password, and now I just have to wait for their fraud department to figure it out. I haven't lost any money; it seems the bad guys were just using me as a middleman in their transactions. Holy crap!
This comes at a time when I'd already been thinking that I need to revamp all my online passwords. I was using the same (not terribly intricate) password for many different things, which is just plain dumb. So I've constructed this very arcane system to create an intricate—but memorable to me—series of numbers and letters for each different online account. I don't care about passwords for Bloglines or Salon.com or CooksTalk or any of that stuff, but I've done it for all sites that have my bank or credit card info. You should, too.
That happened to me, too.
Ugh.
The baked rigatoni was delish!!
Posted by: Anne Glamore | January 26, 2007 at 04:06 PM
I can't remember if I posted it but I had an exciting adventure when I got a PayPal not that they had processed my $750 purchase at some company in Australia! Yikes. Serveral email, phone calls and fraud reports later the money we redeposited to my bank. I set up a new account that has less than $50 as my PayPal account to prevent future problems. PayPal never did tell my how someone accessed my account but I suspect it was an inside job from someone using an inactive account - I don't use it very often.
Posted by: Susan | January 26, 2007 at 09:01 PM
Oh..sorry. A PayPal note. And was not we. Ouch. Preview Preview Preview!
Posted by: Susan | January 26, 2007 at 09:02 PM