CPA from a Patreon inactive account set up 10 years ago

Smegreg

I woke today to an email saying congratulations for subscribing to my Patreon account. It was a French poet account where the subscription got me a french poem once a month. (I don't speak French lol). I checked and it was a real PayPal payment for £11.40 that had left my account so was 'real' and not a spam email that I first thought.

Challenged with PayPal who said it wasn't fraudulent, so I couldn't report it as such - I had set up a CPA in 2017. I haven't used Patreon since then, and obviously have no recollection of the fine print back then.

(I then asked PayPal who I had CPAs with and I can't believe the list of websites I had them with that I hadn't used for years. Obviously I've now cancelled them all.)

My concern is around how this happened. If my PayPal is secure, but there appears to be no time limit on how long a CPA can be charged - and on a website like Patreon where the 'creators' can set any membership subscription price they like - how many other people get stung for this.

I can only assume my Patreon account details were leaked in a data breach maybe? Although I've not had any warning this may be the case. And because I'd linked my PayPal account almost a decade ago, despite having changed banks multiple times in between, they were able to just take money without question. I suppose I was fortunate that it was 'just' a French poetry subscription for a tenner. And obviously I've deactivated my payment details from them. I will cancel the account as soon as the refund request is confirmed.

I don't have a question per se, just hoping someone may be able to put me at ease that I've not missed anything to prevent it happening again. Both Patreon and PayPal didn't appear concerned at all that someone must have fraudulently used my log in details, which surprised me. If nothing else I thought that would have concerned them…

Aylesbury_Duck

Had you missed money leaving your bank account to fund the Paypal payments for all this time, from those other subscriptions?

born_again

TBH, half the subscriptions showing in PP are not actually what could be called a regular subscription.

They are just retailers that you have used in the past.

I have loads to google pay for many various retailers, none of which are for regular payments. Ebay & only one actual subscription to SurfShark.