Is this a joke or what? Paypal?

Question

After work yesteray, I did my typical stuff at home. Start dinner, checked on the pets, make sure they had fresh food and water and checked the mail. In the mailbox was a letter from my bank stating I was hit with a 28 dollar insufficient funds fee for a transaction done two days before for 18k? I reserve checking for bill paying and was shocked as to what this was about (not recalling a bill for that amount) I called the bank and they advised "Paypal" tried to transfer funds? I had to cancel my checking right there on the phone and set up another checking acct. (keep in mind this is now about 6:30pm) I then got on my computer and logged onto paypal, and low and behold whomever it was... was trying it again for 15k (too pre-mature to show yet in the bank) Well, I haven't logged into Paypal for about 8 mths or Ebay for that matter (checked Ebay and no purchases connected) The bottom line in my mind, Paypal's System was hacked? I requested my acct to be cancelled after all these years.

Answer 1

I don't know if this is what happened to you, but, there is a way of hacking into Paypal simply by knowing the email address you use for Paypal. Once that is known, the hacker simply types in some specific script telling Paypal that the password was lost, and requesting a different password. I found this information quite accidentally on Yahoo! Answers!!!!. Needles to say, I thought Paypal patched this, and perhaps they did, but, it may be a possibility that is how you got hacked.

Answer 2

It's probably a good thing you didn't have sufficient funds.

First, call PayPal.  On the PayPal site click Help, and then Contact Us to get the PayPal phone number for wherever you're located.  Chances are someone has hacked your PayPal account.  Usually this happens in one of two ways:

1. Phishing.  Someone sends you a phony email that looks like an official PayPal (or eBay) email.  They trick you into giving out your password.

2. Brute force (or in other words, trial and error).  Most people use insanely simple passwords.  Let's say your email address is [e-mail].  There's a good chance your password is "homersimpson" or something like it, making it easy to guess.