If you have a PayPal account, it’s time to look at how purchases you make with PayPal get processed. Do you have a bank checking account or a credit card linked to your PayPal account? With a link like that, your bank or credit card is immediately debited for purchases you make with your PayPal account. It’s also easy to transfer monies between your bank and PayPal.

PayPal is now being targeted by scammers by making fraudulent charges on your account and making it look like an official charge to an actual service or company. Case in point, I received an email saying that Symantec charged my PayPal account for a $669 subscription that was set up for annual renewal. None of the links in the email were dummy links. They all went to an official Symantec website. The language in the email was perfect in every way. Only the email address of the sender was suspicious as it it didn’t go back to anything like a Symantec website or customer support email. When I checked the PayPal account, nothing showed up as an activity like that. So the first thing I did was to cancel the links in my PayPal account to the bank and I notified both PayPal and Symantec of the potential scam/phishing attack.

John R Carter Sr