Paypal - advice needed.

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You have to be careful when receiveing monies from an unverified account also.

A friend of mine has been stung a few times with credit card fraud. I'm not sure of the details but he's had to go to court over it (he won every time by the way).

The quick point is, he only uses confirmed accounts.

Apparently they say credit card fraud is rife at the moment - i have no idea who 'they' are though.

 

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My question is, how do they manage to identify you as a paypal account holder though. Where do they get their information from ?

Or is this a silly question ?

 

they dont! They just bulk send it to everyone. odd are it will catch some people out, and those who arent just ignore it.

 

you register with your email, so i guess they just spam everyone and see who falls for it.

( sorry if anyone has fallen for it in the past - there seems to be a general rule though - NEVER give your details out within or following on from an email!!! )

 

PayPal's owned by eBay. It's possible to get eBay usernames and e-mail addresses through eBay's profile system. But that's a lot of work - they probably just mass phish using a generic e-mail (that doesn't contain account details), which diverts you to a site that looks like PayPal in order to capture your account details.

 

Not a silly question at all. They don't, hence my point earlier, it will be to a generic addressee. As BBM pointed out though, they *could* technically find it through eBay, and they'll mostly target business users I imagine rather than just casual users

 

Well, I'm all signed up for better or worse.

But I don't mind telling you that all this talk about spoofing and phishing and spyware is really giving me the hibbie-jibbies. Especially after they sent me an e-mail asking me to confirm my email address. And then I clicked something to acivate my account and instantly I started thinking to myself .. oh my God, oh my God, I just handed out the keys to the mansion. Now they're gonna clean out my bank account and then I'm not gonna be able to afford the rent and then they're gonna kick me out into the street and then .... and then ...

What am I gonna do ? What am I gonna do ?

Christ. This an unsafe world we're living in.

 

A way to help beat that is set up a bank account specifically for PayPal transactions, with no overdraft facility. That way, you can only ever put - say - 50 quid in there at a time. That way, if anyone ever did manage to fraudulently access your account, you would only lose that 50 quid, which of course is still not nice but better than that happening to your main account. Also, if you do have a lot of money on your PayPal, transfer it to the bank account, and the minute the transfer is complete move it to your other account that has nothing to do with PayPal. It keeps your money a lot safer and is safer than tying your PayPal to a credit card

 

If you signed up for PayPal, and they immediately sent you a link to click on, then it's an e-mail you expected, and safe to click on.

Unless you're expecting an e-mail from a company, don't click ANY links in their e-mail messages. For example, if a company says that your account password needs to be reset, don't click on their link... go to your account by typing the company's address in your browser and see if it really needs to be reset.

You'll be fine with PayPal, don't sweat it. Well, that is, unless you plan on defrauding customers using your PayPal account, and in that case, your mileage may vary. heh! :P

 

A very useful indicator with emails from Paypal is how the email starts off. If it starts "Dear Headache" (substitute the name you actualy used) then there is a good chance it is genuine. If it starts "Dear Paypal user" then there is a good chance it is a phish.

Remember to use a 'safe' email client (you should anyway) like Thunderbird, and switch off flash etc.

Harry.

 

I'm just being paranoid, I guess. Time for my meds.