I have been a user of Paypal ever since, well, forever, but certainly for at least 25 years by my guess. Today I closed my account, thanks to having gotten several invoices from fraudsters. Today I got an invoice that I couldn’t delete. {“An error has occurred” … no kidding. I felt a great disturbance in the force.) Brian Krebs wrote about this trend last year.This isn’t the first time I have written about Paypal security and scams. Check out here for 2010, here for 2007, and here for 2006.
Last year, after getting another fake invoice, I took precautions by eliminating my checking account as a payment method, and left my account using a credit card as the sole source of funds. This comes after not having had any actual funds in my PP account for years, just using it as a transfer mechanism from some vendors that still paid me that way. Money would come in, and it would go out quickly.
It made me sad to close my PP account — the process which is very easy and just took seconds online, so thanks Paypal for making that simple. And I realize, as one of my friends remarked, that I am not really addressing the problem — any online payment vendor could become the next darling of the fraudsters and give me grief down the road. But I guess I feel that enough is enough. I already use Venmo (which is owned by PayPal), Apple Pay and Google Pay. Do I really need anything else? My son-in-law will start working at Melio, which looks interesting, but I really don’t need another service for my back office accounting.
A few months ago I wrote this piece for CNN’s Underscored about using mobile payment apps. I rated Apple Pay the best of the bunch — if you have an iPhone. But what about web-based apps? There is Google Pay, of course.
I would recommend reading my CNN piece for the caveats about how to stay safe using online payment products. But there is one thing that I didn’t mention — this concept of how to firewall your banking infrastructure. The bank account that was formerly connected to my now-gone Paypal account was my main corporate checking account. That wasn’t a good idea: some hacker could have gained access to those funds. Given the current state of fraudulent invoices, you should have a separate bank account that is just used as a repository for your online transactions. Ideally, it should be at a different bank than your “real” accounts. Just keep a small balance there when you need it. Or use credit cards (and accept the 3% processing fees are the cost of using them.
I just feel like the bad guys have won, and I hate that. I guess it could have been worse: I could have inadvertently paid that fake invoice. Keep sharp out there. Now if I could just stop those nearly daily phone calls from scammers trying to get me to sign up for various Covid cash schemes.
I use PayPal a lot – and am not going to stop now. But I did, thanks to your article, remove my checking account info. Thanks!
I too have received several fraudulent Pay Pal and Venmo invoices. Today, for the first time, I received a fake Stripe request. Because i never suspected stripe I did click on the link (shame on me!).
Cheers!
Recently I got a notice that someone had tried to pull out a lot of money from my account so I called PayPal and they sent me over to a supposedly fraud department this Friday Department seemed very legit but I began to get suspicious because he told me he wanted me to go to my bank and not to let my bank know what I was drawing the money out for then wanted me to take it to an unknown location at that moment to buy crypto and said that if I did that it would throw the scammers off balance it’s just a bunch of malarkey that I couldn’t understand so he wanted me to keep him on the line and not dare hang up until I went to the bank to pull the money out so I decided to call the number again ..the PayPal number I called and a girl only said ” hello” so I drove to my bank and evertime I hungbup the so called fbi person would call back. The banker said just let him.think you are doingbwhat he says…so I asked him where do I go? He gave me Loves store location in town. My banker said if I had gone I could have been robbed !! Idk but I almost fell for it !!!
I’m just so fed up with so many fake invoices from these fraudsters from sucking the life out of my pay pal life span it’s been an overwhelming battle for the most part I’d like to see some financial compensation from all of this strife somewhere in the near future and I’m not talking about Pennie’s or even hundreds of dollars I feel like I’m leaning towards thousands of dollars just because I’ve been disturbed
Rosalind S.