stepford
Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
I've been an Ebay customer for almost 25 years and never had a problem until last month. I found a vehicle being sold under my name that I hadn't listed. I immediately cancelled the listing and contacted Ebay's fraud department. To their credit they quickly acknowledged the fraud, but still deducted the (over $1K) listing and cancellation fees from my bank account - with the assurance that these fees would be refunded. They were eventually, but it took almost a month.
While I was waiting for this reimbursement I was hit by a 2nd fraud - this time in my PayPal account. Someone overseas ordered several hundred dollars worth of electronics and directly charged my bank account. Fortunately PayPal is more on top of fraud claims than Ebay. They validated my fraud claim within 10 minutes and refunded the charges to my bank account immediately so I never saw a loss.
I suspect that these closely spaced occurrences were both the result of a separate hack of data from my email provider. In the aftermath I changed passwords for all of these services and de-linked my bank account from Ebay and PayPal. I considered removing my accounts entirely, but believe (hope) that operating only through my credit card in the future will provide me with a sufficient extra layer of fraud protection.
The upshot of all of this is that I didn't lose any money, but could have been much more adversely impacted in the short run if the fraudsters had decided to yank more money than they did from my account. Though it will make some of these e-commerce services less convenient for me in the future I would think long and hard before ever giving one my bank information again.
While I was waiting for this reimbursement I was hit by a 2nd fraud - this time in my PayPal account. Someone overseas ordered several hundred dollars worth of electronics and directly charged my bank account. Fortunately PayPal is more on top of fraud claims than Ebay. They validated my fraud claim within 10 minutes and refunded the charges to my bank account immediately so I never saw a loss.
I suspect that these closely spaced occurrences were both the result of a separate hack of data from my email provider. In the aftermath I changed passwords for all of these services and de-linked my bank account from Ebay and PayPal. I considered removing my accounts entirely, but believe (hope) that operating only through my credit card in the future will provide me with a sufficient extra layer of fraud protection.
The upshot of all of this is that I didn't lose any money, but could have been much more adversely impacted in the short run if the fraudsters had decided to yank more money than they did from my account. Though it will make some of these e-commerce services less convenient for me in the future I would think long and hard before ever giving one my bank information again.