Paypal security

[Kendhni]

Some of you will know that I have had trouble with Paypal in the past. The synopsis is that 4 years ago someone set up a Paypal account using my primary email address (my Paypal account is against an older email). I contacted PayPal, on several occasions, who were not interested in it despite obvious GDPR issues. I had tried using Facebook to reach out to the person (in Australia) to get control and tell them of the security risks, but she wasn't interested and I could not get into the account since Paypal had the security pretty well nailed down. I did have some fun sending password reminders to her phone in the early hours of the morning.

I am not willing to go into great detail on the how, but recently Paypal did an emailing (ironically a security email) that inadvertently provided me with a means of accessing and taking control of the account. I successfully did this and immediately blocked my Australian friend from the account. I have reached out to her on Facebook again to assure her that I have no ulterior motives behind this and will gladly send her whatever information she needs from it before I ask Paypal to close the account. My intention is to then migrate my current Paypal account (against the old email address) to my primary email address (in return I will explain to Paypal how I got around their security).

So moral of the story is that if the account is important to you, and it allows multi-factor-authentication, then make sure MFA is enabled.