The analysis of my computer did not turn up anything that could have been used to grab my PayPal credentials and make the transfer and I did scan it with a multitude of scanners.

The support line at PayPal was not helpful at all and could not even tell me if I was the only one that has logged into my own PayPal account recently claiming that it was against their privacy policy to disclose such data. That was very unfortunate because it would have helped me tremendously to know if someone logged into my account to make the payment.

I was contacted at the same day by Steve Ragan from The Tech Herald who published an interview about the case on the website. That interview seemed to have sparked the interest of PayPal because I was shortly after contacted by their CISO who wanted to transfer my case to a specialized team, he called it unusual e-crimes investigations team. That was a pleasant surprise and I had hopes that I would finally find out how the money was transferred.

Unfortunately though I have not heard back yet and I’m not sure if I ever will. I know that some big companies are rather slow when working on cases but it has been two weeks and no reply since.

Last but not least Steve contacted me again telling me that the guys at VeriSign would like to send me one of those PayPal Security Key after they have heard the story which is really nice of them. Unfortunately though I have ordered one already which has not arrived yet. It’s also been two weeks since then and I’m beginning to see a pattern here. So VeriSign nice, PayPal not so nice. I will keep you updated if I’m ever contacted again by PayPal about this matter.

Update:

I received both the PayPal Security Key and the VeriSign ID Protection key shortly after finishing the article. Will write about those soon.

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Imagine my surprise when I discovered that a payment for all the money in the PayPal account has been made at 23:35:35 PDT to Santrex Internet Services. I was not awake at that time which could only mean that someone else managed to make the transaction. The question is how.

I contacted PayPal and filed for unauthorized payment and did contact the “seller” as well who replied telling me that someone did buy Virtual Servers from the money. I’m pretty sure that I will get the money back the question however is how someone was able to make that transaction in first place.

The possibility is there that someone was able to get my password for PayPal somehow and made the transaction that way. I’m not sure if there is a possibility to make a transaction from PayPal without logging into the account. It does not look this way.

I checked my system with latest anti-virus software and found nothing. I also checked the PayPal account settings and changed the passwords there. I will change all passwords for all sites just to make sure that someone did not get them all.

The strange thing is that the payment was only made for the amount that I had lying around in my account. Anyone ever heard of something like that ? The real question is how he was able to get into my account as it is unlikely that transactions could have been made without my PayPal login data.

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