Getting hacked online, paypal attack.

I woke up this morning to an interesting text message from paypal. It asked my if I logged in at 3:30 am local time. The obvious answer is no, but I don’t think anything of it. I log on into my email to see if I received any emails from paypal. I had to look hard because I received 100’s of emails between like 3:15 am and 3:30 am. I had to search. I received 2 emails, 1 saying I added a new email and a second saying I changed my password. Here I am like “Whoa, Whoa, Whoa!.”

I go to paypal and go to log in. Guess what? I cannot. Not only can I not log-in, but my email address is no longer attached to any paypal account. Well, now I am a little scared. I am scared because this is attached to my main 2 banking acounts and, of course, my paypal credit. I take instant care of my 2 main accounts, moving money arround so the accounts are empty. That is fine. While doing this, I am calling paypals service center, for which the email stating I requested changing my password said to call if there was an issue. I obviously checked the phone number in that email to paypals phone numbers, and it was accurate.

I went through their menu… multiple time. At first it says that there is a high volume of calls and that my wait time may be a while, and a quicker way to get help would be on their website. I cannot use these options because I cannot log-in. Figured that would be obvious, and that there would be a way to ask for help without logging in for just this situation. I finally get a little fed up and ask to speak to a real person. This is when the news comes out. I have to wait until 9am local time to talk to someone about this issue. What damage could be done while I wait for this time to talk to some one? I am completely powerless with my own money, more or less, right now.

Although online payment is very convenient, and has worked well for me throughout the last, let’s see, 17 years, give or take, through paypal, I think that I may be giving up online shopping, which is great during a time when people like me are being cast aside in society. Be careful when it comes to online payments. Companies are popping up left and right offering this service, but I was just hacked on the largest and most secure of them.