OT: PayPal Fraud Alert
blue227
Posts: 185 ✭✭
A few days ago, i posted a question about whether anyone knew of PayPal having system problems since I had not been receiving email confirmations for PayPal transactions.
Well, earlier today, I received an email from Experian, a credit monitoring service that i subscribe to, informing me that there was an update to my personal credit history.
When I go online to take a look at the update, I see that, around the date that i stopped receiving PP's email confirmations, someone added a new credit card to my PayPal account and decided to send themselves $990.00.
I have no idea how this was done and have since changed all my passwords for any type of internet account.
I don't know if the halt in PP email confirmations was triggered by this person who decided to give themselves $990.00 or if it's just a coincidence with the PP system problems that others have reported.
In any event, if you've also experienced some sort of disruption to your confirmations from PP, you might want to log into your account to see if there have been any new credit cards added or unauthorized charges made to your account.
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Has anyone else been having email notification problems with PayPal lately?
Over the past 2 days, I have not received any emails from PayPal when I have made a payment, received a payment, or printed a shipping label.
I don't have a spam blocker and I'm receiving emails from other sources so it doesn't seem like a firewall problem.
I checked my "notifications" settings on PayPal and they are set to what they've always been --- i'm supposed to get email confirmations whenever i used PayPal.
Any thoughts or insight?
Well, earlier today, I received an email from Experian, a credit monitoring service that i subscribe to, informing me that there was an update to my personal credit history.
When I go online to take a look at the update, I see that, around the date that i stopped receiving PP's email confirmations, someone added a new credit card to my PayPal account and decided to send themselves $990.00.
I have no idea how this was done and have since changed all my passwords for any type of internet account.
I don't know if the halt in PP email confirmations was triggered by this person who decided to give themselves $990.00 or if it's just a coincidence with the PP system problems that others have reported.
In any event, if you've also experienced some sort of disruption to your confirmations from PP, you might want to log into your account to see if there have been any new credit cards added or unauthorized charges made to your account.
______________________________________________________________
Has anyone else been having email notification problems with PayPal lately?
Over the past 2 days, I have not received any emails from PayPal when I have made a payment, received a payment, or printed a shipping label.
I don't have a spam blocker and I'm receiving emails from other sources so it doesn't seem like a firewall problem.
I checked my "notifications" settings on PayPal and they are set to what they've always been --- i'm supposed to get email confirmations whenever i used PayPal.
Any thoughts or insight?
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source:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/17/paypal_ipn_meltdown/
A glitch in PayPal's payment verification system is wreaking havoc on some ecommerce sites that depend on the service. For more than 48 hours, the bug in PayPal's instant payment notification has made it impossible for them to process orders, owners of these businesses complain.
Making matters worse, the glitch causes credit card holders who place orders to be billed even though they are unable to take delivery of the goods or services they've just purchased. PayPal customers began reporting the difficulty on Thursday morning and at time of publication - more than two days later - PayPal owner eBay was still struggling to fix the problem.
"We can't accept payments done with PayPal which is a really large share of our payments since most of our customers are from America and PayPal is almost a de facto standard or means for online payment there," Rikard Froberg, technical director of eClassical.com wrote in an email. "The customer knows nothing about this, orders and pays but never gets the goods he paid for, or gets them very late (for instant delivery, the patience is very short) so it looks like the store ripping the customer off."
Others are fuming, too. Denizens of this forum, among others, are calling for the head of PayPal admins, who are said to have caused the outage when updating the instant payment notification (IPN) system. They also complain that PayPal was slow to acknowledge the problem. The company didn't inform users of the glitch until Friday afternoon, more than 24 hours after complaints began rolling in.
PayPal spokeswoman Amanda Pires said Saturday that a "percentage of merchants a percentage of the time" don't receive an IPN. Company developers are scrambling to fix the problem. "We are looking at this as a high priority fix," she said. "We've been working around the clock. We're hoping to have a fix as soon as possible."
Asked to estimate that percentage of customers or the percentage of times they receive failures, Pires said it's "much less than the majority of the time."
For his part, Froberg says all IPNs to eClassical.com are broken. The Sweden-based website sells DRM-free classical music in real time, so the glitch means that it's customers have paid for files they are unable to download. Many eCommerce websites run on scripts that don't complete a transaction until an IPN is received from PayPal. eClassical.com also accepts credit card payments.
The meltdown comes as eBay is requiring some customers to use PayPal if they want to continue using the service. It also comes on the heels of Friday's discovery of serious scripting error on the PayPal site that could have enabled attackers to create convincing spoof pages that stole users' authentication credentials. It took PayPal several hours, but the company's security pros eventually squashed the security bug.
There is also two key-loggers included in it which are keeping track of every key stroke you do and send the information to some off
site computer. You might want to check for these.