We experienced problems today adding our business credit card to our PayPal account.

It eventually transpired that a company, we made a previous purchase from online, used our email address and credit card number to open a Czech PayPal account.

Stupidly, by using our email address they weren’t able to effectively verify this account but learning that this happened came as a shock.

Kudos to PayPal for their fantastic customer service.  Wait time was less than a minute, the three people I had to speak with were all extremely professional and we didn’t have to explain ourselves from the beginning when being transferred to the next operator.  They identified the rogue account once I gave them my credit card number and were happy to wait online whilst i reset the rogue account’s pasword, took a look inside it, removed my credit card info and closed the account down.

We know exactly where the information came from because we use unique email addresses for every business we deal with.  There is a possibility that this company got hacked and were unaware of it, but seeing as this new PayPal account was set up in Czech Koronas and the company we orderd from is also based there, we’re inclinded to think that this was a deliberate attempt at misusing customer information. 

No harm was done so this isn’t something we’ll take time to investigate but it is in PayPal’s hands now and we’re curious to know if the origin company will reply to our enquiry into what may have happened.