Hacked Paypal account

Keldin

My GF has just found someone has been using her Paypal account.
Somehow someone has gotten in to it 4 days ago and transferred out the balance she had in there to a US bank. 3 days later 2 people have sent payments to it and that balance was transferred out immediately to the same US bank account.
She received an email acknowledging that last transfer (but not the previous ones for some reason) so whe was able to stop that. However the previous transfer of her pre-existing balance 4 days ago shows completed.
Does anyone know if it can still be stopped? She had quite a bit in her balance and although she now has a higher balance i suspect Paypal will return that to the 2 people who paid in yesterday so she'll be the one who ends up out of pocket.

I would love to know how someone gained access to it as she hasn't logged in in ages and never from a computer other than her laptop at home.

K

frivolous_fay

She might have a key-logger on her computer, which tracks her passwords and send them to someone else. If she hasn't logged in recently that might not be very likely, as you'd have thought someone would have been in there and spending money well before now.

Another favourite scam is the phishing email - an apparently legit email from paypal which tricks you into entering your login details, then sends them to the scammer.

In fact, phishing emails can be targeted for different things, banks, ebay, anything with a login and money at stake, basically - so if your G/F uses the same passwords on multiple accounts, someone may have got hold of the password and figured it was worth trying on other accounts, like paypal.

Keldin

She's extremely computer literate. Better even than a lot of IT support staff I've had working for me. She's also very wary of phishing emails and so it's not that. She's also not logged in on that laptop since I rebuilt it several weeks ago and all out computers have anti-virus and anti-spyware and she doesn't log in to her mail from public computers.

The annoying thing is the initial transfer of her money out of the account happened without any email confirmation from Paypal. It was only the second one they sent an email for which is how we caught it. Paypal have also used her old email address for some notification (the 2 payment made by other people yesterday) and her primary one they shoudl be using for the subsequent transfer of the money out.
So she's saved the money that belongs to 2 people who have been scammed by fake sales but lost hers because it happened 4 days ago without notification. In fact there were 3 steps done 4 days ago and Paypal never sent a email about any of them. If they had we would have been able to stop it in time.

We called Paypal but they were less than helpful. Just talked her through doing things online which she had already done. In fact after being told someone stole her money out of her account the guy at the call centre tried to make small talk by asking her how her day had been.

K

nzmegs

I would check your email trash to see if the paypal emails have been deleted. It is possible this person or persons could also have access to her email account. Make sure she has changed all her passwords. Do this from another computer (like one at work or the library) so that any key loggerwon't have access. I had a problem with my ebay account recently along the same lines so I totally sympathise.

pdel61

Keldin wrote: »

My GF has just found someone has been using her Paypal account.
Somehow someone has gotten in to it 4 days ago and transferred out the balance she had in there to a US bank.

I'm not great at all these short abreviations, please can you tell me what GF stands for, all I can come up with is grandfather but you use she/her in the rest of the email, so please enlighten me.

pinkgem

pdel61 wrote: »

I'm not great at all these short abreviations, please can you tell me what GF stands for, all I can come up with is grandfather but you use she/her in the rest of the email, so please enlighten me.

girlfriend

kitekat

I wrote here about this yesterday.I had my Paypal account hacked into by a company called Nexon America Inc in Oct.They stole four amounts on the same day within 10mins of each other.I am very careful with my details and have no idea how this happened.I have only just gotten it sorted out and got my money back from Paypal,i have closed my acc as i no longer trust Paypal.I found this site which may be of interest to people https://www.paypalsucks.com.

frivolous_fay

I don't think paypalsucks is going to teach you how to stop your details getting stolen.

Rather than blaming paypal, you might want to look into your own security. Are you going to close your bank account if that gets hacked too?

kitekat

I didnt say paypalsucks would stop anyones acc getting hacked,it is a very interesting site for all sorts of paypal probs.There is nothing wrong with my security and yes i would change banks if i was hacked it my perogative to bank with who i choose.

Keldin

frivolous_fay wrote: »

I don't think paypalsucks is going to teach you how to stop your details getting stolen.

Rather than blaming paypal, you might want to look into your own security. Are you going to close your bank account if that gets hacked too?

Actually I would close my account if teh bank couldn't keep ther people out. I have closed accounts when the bank said they couldn't stop a company taking money every month when I had only authorised a one off payment.

In this case paypal have a lot to answer for. They never sent out email notification when changes were made to the account until they transferred money out a second time. The initial changing of the account from pounds to dollars, linking in a bank account and transferring hundreds of dollars went on without any email notification. Since I run my own mail server I can prove no mail was sent. It was when they did decide to send one for the second transfer that we caught it. We would have caught the first one if an email had been sent.

I've known about paypalsucks for a long time and also about their dodgy practices and that they aren't accountable to anyone as they are not a bank and are not bound by any financial service regulations. Unfortunately they have become a necessary evil if you want to use ebay.

the password for teh paypal account was unique and not linked to any other account. Since it hadn't been logged into for months and was only ever used from a single computer I am also certain that the password was not obtained from a keylogger.

None of this however is related to my actual question in the original post which was is there any way to get the first transfer made 4 days ago. Since paypal claim 5-7 working days to transfer to a UK account I wanted to know if they would be able to reverse the other one.

K

frivolous_fay

Keldin wrote: »

None of this however is related to my actual question in the original post which was is there any way to get the first transfer made 4 days ago. Since paypal claim 5-7 working days to transfer to a UK account I wanted to know if they would be able to reverse the other one.

Sorry, I thought the question was 'I would love to know how someone gained access to it as she hasn't logged in in ages and never from a computer other than her laptop at home.'