I just got an e-mail from PayPal saying that my PayPal account has been disabled:
We have reason to believe that your account was accessed by a third party. We have limited access to sensitive PayPal account features in case your account has been accessed by an unauthorised third party.
It smells like a phishing attempt, but it’s not. There are no links in the mail, and when I log on to PayPal (by typing the PayPal URL into my browser bar) it does indeed say my account has been disabled.
It’s curious for a couple of reasons though:
- I don’t hand my password out to anybody, so the only way my account could have been accessed by a third party is if PayPal has been hacked.
- They claim that PayPal has "limited access to sensitive PayPal account features" which, frankly, makes no sense whatsoever.
I’d ask PayPal customer service to explain what’s going on but – based on past experience and their policy of not answering e-mails in "an effort to assist me as quickly and efficiently as possible" – that would be a singularly ineffective way of getting an answer. So I’m not even going to try.
Does anybody else know what’s up?
I’ll probably just cancel my PayPal account. If they’ll let me.
How can such a shitty company be so successful?