PayPal security is amazing. It randomly locks people out of their accounts and randomly closes their accounts too, but actual fraudsters and criminals are never deterred.
German, well West European, banks are slow in creating a competitor to Paypal, called Wero. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_(payment) I'm not implying they block Paypal because of that. It's good to have more competition and I wished my bank would take part.
> European banks have seen widespread unauthorised direct debits from PayPal accounts, the German Savings Banks Association (DSGV) says.
> The German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) says payments worth in the region of 10 billion euros (£8.6bn) have had to be blocked, after PayPal's fraud-checking system failed.
[0] I was impeded by cookie popups and adblock/privacy-mode blockers in another language, and neither are direct reports or superior details.
paypal is trash, if you have issues, they can hold your payments or does whatever they want to you and you have very little recourse. They make up all the rules as "regulations". A lot of times there is no choice but to use them.
It is worth remembering that PayPal not only handles payments but also provides a degree of assurance to receive the goods. A pure payment system does not. From a customer perspective this can provide real value as filing a claim with PayPal gets merchants definitely to listen more closely.
Recently I found out that one of my friends had his identity stolen, thousands and thousands drained from his bank accounts. After thorough investigation it was traced to a PayPal breach, and he had to fight hard to get them to admit it was their fault. He got everything back, eventually, but the whole process was a nightmare.
Arbitraging fraud has always been PayPal's game. For the mass market of small-scale sellers there's a threshold, whre the cost of onboarding, verifying, underwriting and eating fraud exposure is greater than the revenues you could ever expect to make from them at their low volume. So these segments went un-served, same with many other segments of transactions or transactors. PayPal's model has always been to accept a higher risk tolerance, then to have just-enough compensating controls and/or liability-dodging to make that work. At least just well enough to have net-revenues bps exceed their fraud-loss bps.
And when that balance is working, it kinda works, but when it doesn't...
And incidentally, it's not just PayPal with the fraud problems these days. It's everybody in the banking and payments space. AI is so far quite asymmetrically helping the bad guys more. It's bad out there.
This article is useless. It seems like an English translation of some German blogspam (and the ads are even making it through my filter).
It says nothing other than PayPal is having some security failures and banks are blocking deposits from PayPal. What are these security failures? What is the mechanism of fraudulent activity that is being exploited?
I’m surprised this was upvoted so much… am I missing something? It seems to be a bunch of words saying basically nothing.
Last week my PayPal account was "permanently disabled" this also happened to two of my friends at the same time. Is anyone else going through this right now? When I looked it up on Reddit it seemed like a widespread error that started last week. Could it be related to this? Are there any steps I should be taking to try to get my account back? Any help here would be really appreciated.
Wow this headline is quite striking. I wonder what happened all of a sudden for their fraud checks to fail. This is exactly the kind of issues where we could use insight from some insider. I am somehow not super optimistic that PayPal will publicly respond to it
I got once my PayPal account blocked due to negative balance, but there was no transaction in the history and not even customer support was able to tell me why my account went to minus. They even sent me fairly threatening email and the whole process felt like a scam attempt.
Later on I found out that it was due to a bounced transaction 3 months earlier, but the fee for bounced transaction was not reported anywhere and my PayPal account balance just got changed to -5 eur. I've closed my PayPal account directly right after this incident and never used PayPal again.
I'm a victim of such a fraud. It started gently on LinkedIn and ended up on http://fiverr.com that exploits PayPal to extract money from unsuspecting clients. I paid for CV editing service that was never provided. 60 euros gone and PayPal just accepts sellers side of the story.
http://fiverr.com is a scam. Don't use it.
PayPal's support is a joke.
This is exactly why compliance frameworks exist. When your security controls fail, it doesn't just affect you - it ripples through every organization that trusts you.
German banks are right to be concerned. PayPal processes massive amounts of financial data, and if their security posture is compromised, everyone downstream is at risk.
The real test of any security program isn't whether incidents happen - it's how quickly you detect them, contain them, and communicate with affected parties.
23 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 52.9 ms ] thread> European banks have seen widespread unauthorised direct debits from PayPal accounts, the German Savings Banks Association (DSGV) says.
> The German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) says payments worth in the region of 10 billion euros (£8.6bn) have had to be blocked, after PayPal's fraud-checking system failed.
[0] I was impeded by cookie popups and adblock/privacy-mode blockers in another language, and neither are direct reports or superior details.
And when that balance is working, it kinda works, but when it doesn't...
And incidentally, it's not just PayPal with the fraud problems these days. It's everybody in the banking and payments space. AI is so far quite asymmetrically helping the bad guys more. It's bad out there.
[1]:https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2024/04/04/german-s...
It says nothing other than PayPal is having some security failures and banks are blocking deposits from PayPal. What are these security failures? What is the mechanism of fraudulent activity that is being exploited?
I’m surprised this was upvoted so much… am I missing something? It seems to be a bunch of words saying basically nothing.
Later on I found out that it was due to a bounced transaction 3 months earlier, but the fee for bounced transaction was not reported anywhere and my PayPal account balance just got changed to -5 eur. I've closed my PayPal account directly right after this incident and never used PayPal again.
http://fiverr.com is a scam. Don't use it. PayPal's support is a joke.