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from the Email-confirmation-just-slows-us-down dept.
Recently, I received an email from PayPal asking to confirm my email address for a new account. Since I do not use PayPal, I figured it was a phishing scam and ignored it. However, I started getting other emails, which included updated address information and a sales transaction. The name for the account was not mine (but the first name was the same), and the address was in a different state.
Looking at the raw email headers, it appeared to be legitimate emails from PayPal. What confused me was that I never responded to the email confirmation message, so why would PayPal allow a person to perform a transaction without confirmation? Since the email in question is a Gmail account, I have had since Gmail beta, I wondered if my account had been compromised, but there is nothing to indicate that. Another idea was someone could be intercepting/listening to my email, but that is a lot of effort to do for a simple paypal transaction.
The likely scenario is PayPal failed to check the account email and suspend any further actions until the address is confirmed. PayPal sends an email to confirm the address, but does not bother to wait for the confirmation.
I called PayPal support, and after some time and educating the support person on how technology works, the person put in a support ticket. Not sure if the problem will ever get resolved or if PayPal will admit they have a problem. As of now, I have not received any more emails. I will have to decide if it is worth my time to call support again and get the disposition of the ticket.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @04:53PM
Likely these messages only come to people who don't already have a paypal account tied to their email.
And now that makes me think, in addition to being a way for a malicious user to use a paypal account not tied to the email it could also be a way for them to try and get money destined to other people. You can send money on paypal to any email address regardless of if it has an account set up or not, and if not it will just send an email saying to create an account. I've had coworkers (paying for picked up lunches, etc) send a paypal to me without confirming which of my multiple email addresses to use (and so now I have my PP account tied to all of them). It's possible a spammer could get free money by setting up paypal accounts tied to other people's email addresses.