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Paypal problem?

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NutmegCT

NutmegCT

Great Pumpkin
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Good morning.

I got a (spurious?) email this morning that my PayPal transfer had been completed. Of course, I didnt' make that transfer, the amount is unreal (I couldnt' afford it!), and the PayPal system is now (7amEST) "down". I can't even do a traceroute or ping to https://www.paypal.com.

Anyone else notice PayPal problems in the last 24 hours?

Here's an interesting link about a PayPal "issue" yesterday :

https://www.pcworld.com/article/id,139507-c,cybercrime/article.html

Looks like someone has been playing around with PayPal again.

Thanks.
Tom
 
Tom, I've used PayPal twice in the last 24 hours, and had no problem.
Did you forward a copy of the email to their spoof site?
I occasionally get those from either eBay or PayPal, and just immediately forward them to the respective spoof addresses, then delete them.
Jeff
 
I think just about ANY email from "PayPal" is a spoof. If I'm not mistaken, they contact you through message in your "My Ebay" account.

I've received several of these in the past. By all means, DON'T respond to them. Forward them, unopened, to spoof@paypal.com.

Mickey
 
Thanks for the quick replies.

Note that in my first post here, the email is *about* a PayPal transaction. It's not from PayPal. I was finally able to login to PayPal and verify the transaction never took place. But keep reading ....

The email is from the recipient of a previous PayPal payment I made; thus, the sender is valid. His email shows I made a *very* large deposit to his PayPal account. I didn't.

I forwarded his email to spoof at paypal, soon as I received it. Take a look at the PCWorld article I linked; there are hundreds of thousands of PayPal accounts which have been "compromised".

Tom
 
PayPal notifying account owners? Sure hope so - but as the "bots" were placed on individual computers all across the country, how would they know which accounts were compromised. The PCWorld article implies that usernames and passwords were gathered from individual computers, not from PayPal itself.

Just out of curiosity ... are you guys having any "slowness" problems with websites this morning?

Changing from this forum to the Triumph forum here takes several seconds. Contacting PayPal takes up to a minute. Same for Washington Post, Manchester Guardian, BBC, etc. Also very slow to finish loading the page once contacted.

Tom
 
Tom, the notification comment was just idle speculation on my part. I <u>did</u> go into my account and review the past years activity though. I didn't find anything amiss, thankfully.
My connection speed has been about normal for here.(Comcast High Speed). I sometimes have trouble on this site. Last night it took over three minutes to post a reply.
Jeff
 
If you receive an unexpected email from Paypal with a link they want you to click - DON'T! There is a very good chance that it is not really a link to Paypal, but a link to a mirror site designed to look like Paypal. Then they intice you to enter your username and password and guess what - now they have YOUR user name and password. Of way you can tell if its fake is to save the email on your hard drive, then open it with a text editor. what you are likely to see is something like this somewhere in the HTML text:

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Code:</div><div class="ubbcode-body ubbcode-pre" style="height: 34px;"><pre><a href=213.78.XX.XX/Paypal>https://www.paypal.com</a> </pre>[/QUOTE]

If the stuff imediately after the href= is not the paypal address you see displayed in the link, then chances are when you click the link you will be directed to a look-alike phishing site. Either that or you follow the link and it installs MALWARE on your computer to harvest all your usernames and passwords.
 
Again, if it's a legitimate message from PayPal, you'll receive it when you login to ebay (or PayPal, for that matter). Easiest method to verify. I ignore the ones that come in an email, or sometimes send them on to spoof.
 
Yep - watch out for those PayPal and/or eBay "emails".

But the problem wasn't either of those two ... it was a "bot" on 1000s of personal computers across the USA, sending the owner's individual PayPal info to the originator of the "bot". That's what the PCWorld article refers to.

The email that I got just alerted me to the fact that there's a security problem with many PayPal accounts.

Might be a good idea to check your PayPal account to make sure there's no "surprise". Note the articles are from the last 24 hours - so it's a very new problem.

Tom
 
PS - once again, I've been trying to open the PayPal homepage and it fails trying to open "paypalobjects.com".

What happens when you try to open the PayPal homepage now?

Tom
 
If Paypal emails you they will use your name in the email. If your name is not there it is a phoney and send it to Paypal. They are very good at taking action against that sort of stuff.
 
Mickey Richaud said:
Again, if it's a legitimate message from PayPal, you'll receive it when you login to ebay (or PayPal, for that matter). Easiest method to verify. I ignore the ones that come in an email, or sometimes send them on to spoof.
Click to expand...

That is true, but anytime I do a transfer from PayPal to my Back Account, I immediately receive an email from PayPal (in my regular email) tellimg me that my transfer is in progress. The email is plaintext and never contains any links to click on. I have also received other notifications that were legit from PayPal that were not plain text (HTML). PayPal does send legit emails, but they will never send an email asking you to click on a link and login to your account.
 
Ain't the internet grand?

Got up this morning, checked email at breakfast.

One new message: an email from someone I did business with several days ago, basically saying "thanks for depositing $2400 in my PayPal account".

hmmm - as I only transferred $10 to the guy's PayPal account, I got suspicious. So I tried logging on to PayPal, and got consistent "server not available" messages, or hangs after the server was finally reached.

So I googled "PayPal fraud" and got several news items from November 10 regarding the recent botnet attack involving PayPal usernames and passwords.

That got me going ... so I again try to get to PayPal, and get through on my 10th attempt. Immediately check my account and see all's ok. Then try to change my password, entered the PayPal secure "enter new password and answer these security questions" section, and again, PayPal server is not reachable. AFTER I've entered my new password.

Try CNN - it's fine - BBC is fine - then PayPal comes up fine. Hit link to change password: "server not available".
Try CNN etc. - they're all "not available".

So there's an internet issue somewhere along the line in my neck o' the woods.

But of course, that has nothing to do with the PayPal account "invasion" referred to in the PCWorld (and other) articles.

Keep in mind - we're not talking about a "nasty fake email from PayPal". We're talking a major bot attack on thousands of computers, where PayPal info on those individual computers was copied and sent to the bot attack instigator.

Ah the joys of living in a world of bits and bytes. Sure hope I can get in contact with PayPal again soon, as I'm stuck somewhere in a limbo of PayPal thinking I'm changing my password, but not being able to confirm the new password with PayPal being unreachable.

Onward through the fog!
Tom
 
11:18am and still again - can't connect to paypal.

Would someone kindly try a traceroute (or TRACERT if you're running Windows) to:

24.151.8.33

That's my ISP nearest router. Wondering if the snarlup is before or after that device.

Thanks.
Tom
 
If you get ANY emails from paypal automatically send them to spoof@ebay.com. 99% are false phishing scams.
Also consider downloading the Ebay toolbar as it has a feature that helps identify false sites also.

If you responded to a spoof site IMEDIATLEY change your login in information at the very least.
 
Tom, I did a tracert and it wound up at charter in Ct. Took about 8 seconds for the full route.
I also had no problem accessing PayPal to change my password.
Jeff
 
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