My Paypal account was hacked last night!
Over a period of 30 minutes, someone took out most of my money (luckily there wasn't a large amount in th account!) in 8 payments. Let me tell you, that was a long 30 minutes for me! Finally it dawned on me to change my password and that put things to a stop.
The problem? My password.
Unfortunately I picked an easy one for me to remember (apparently a little too obvious) and I used it for numerous different accounts online.
The Paypal tech told me that what happens is that when you are on a website whose security is not high, someone can detect your password and other information about you, and then take that information and search the internet until they find a place where it opens your account. Obviously, people like that like to look in your bank, your credit card accounts and places like Paypal where money resides.
So, if your passwords are simple, change them now. And for your financial websites, have a difficult to guess password unique to each one.
Mine have all been changed and they are certainly passwords that only I could think up for myself.
The Paypal rep told me that my money would be returned to me within 10 days as long as everything checked out. IP addresses will tell from what computer the money was paid out to (or at least the address will show that it was not my own computer).
I wanted to post this so you could learn this lesson the easy way, not the hard way like I had too.
Apparently the internet is not that safe place that it feels like sometimes!
