My Paypal Account Was Hacked!

A couple of weeks ago, I was making an evening meal for BB when I got an email from PayPal.

They had noticed something suspicious on my account and wanted me to check it out. The problem for me, was that I wasn't sure if this email was from PayPal, I mean generally the spam emails telling me that my account has a problem get marked as spam, but every so often I get a dodgy one and I have a giggle.

This one however seemed legit.

And so I logged into my PayPal account on the PC (I'd opened the email on my phone) and checked out what was happening.

PayPal Logo


Sure enough, my paypal had been compromised and someone had purchased themselves a rather lovely imitation Snake Skin Belt on ebay and was having it shipped to the Ukraine.

I wanted to swear, but generally I try not to.

I started taking action, I asked for a refund as the transaction had been fraudulent. I checked my account for other names or emails or addresses that had been added (there wasn't any), I changed my password, I called my husband and told him.

After a bit of research, Daddy found out that a few years ago Yahoo had been hacked. He did a search on the data that had been leaked (still available online) and found out that my email and a variation of a password I use was there.

This is how they had managed to get into my account.

I wanted to swear again.

I was shocked.

I ended up going to every single account I could think that I had online and changing my passwords from the various combinations of the password that was online to random sequences of letters and numbers.

I had to write them down and if I'm honest that is a REAL problem, because if this piece of paper with my passwords ever gets out? Well. That would cause me more issues right?

The only lasting damage I've had from this is that I keep being refused access to some of my accounts because I can't remember the new passwords!

Paypal was brilliant about this. I mean, they alerted me to it first of all, they let me know what was happening and then they gave me a full refund. If only every issue was as easy to resolve as this one.

Have you ever had an account hacked?