I checked my bank the other day and something came out which I wasn’t expecting, $70 was taken out of my bank account labelled ‘PayPal Envato’. I didn’t have a clue what that meant, so I emailed PayPal and this is what they said when they emailed me a link:-
Dear Customer/former customer,
We’d like to inform all past and present customers that last year, a former employee was reprimanded for illegal acts
regarding our PayPal system.
We have reason to believe that majority PayPal customers, have had various amounts taken from their bank accounts without
their consent. The payment name used for these unauthorized transactions is ‘Envato’. During the investigation it was
discovered that this is in no way related or linked to Envato.com and their other affiliated companies.
Unfortunately, we are unable to refund those customers due to the mass of damage this has done to the majority of
customers all over the world.
All customer bank accounts and cards that were stored on our website from from 01/01/2010 - 5/28/2011, have had their other
bank accounts and cards stored on our database. Our system gained information from all customers’ other bank accounts
and cards as collateral. This process was approved in 2009 by all banks across the world.
The police were heavily involved and we have now taken a serious step to increase our security further, so that this does
NOT happen again. We are immensely sorry that this illegal act transpired.
Many apologies!
I mean, I’m not a customer anymore and PayPal have somehow taken $70 out of my bank account? It doesn’t make sense to me??!!
That email doesn’t sound remotely official… the language is poor, the message isn’t clear and, given that it claims this issue is so large it would impact millions of people and be on the front page of CNN, I can’t see that happening.
Sounds like a phishing attempt. You didn’t by chance give them a bunch of information to help “investigate”?
As Ted says, the email looks like it was written by someone with a very poor grasp of English. Now I’m not saying that all staff at PayPal are in line for poet laureate, but I’d hope that any official communication was written in better language than that.
If they’re claiming that this affected the majority of PayPal customers over a period of nearly 18 months, how come no-one else has heard about it? Google’s bringing up nothing remotely relevant for “paypal envato scam”. I’ve heard nothing about it before.
When you “emailed” them, how did you do that? Did you send an email (and if so, to what address)? Did you click on a link in an email claiming to be from them? Or did you type “paypal.com” into your browser and get to their website that way?