PayPal, Part 3

This morning (why is it always first thing in the morning, before my first infusion of French Roast courage?!), I had an email from PayPal, saying my account had been "limited," and that I needed to change my password and security questions.

Well, okay.  I figured this had followed from the previous week's misadventures in electronic funds transfer.  During that crisis, I had changed my security settings with no prompting from the company.  They, in fact, seemed rather surprised that I had done this on my own, without them having to tell me to do it (or how to do it).

But it had been roughly a week, and since they were coming back to me with this little heads-up, I decided to cooperate and change the password and questions again.  Having recently learned some valuable techniques for creating really hard-to-crack passwords, I figured this would be sort of fun.
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I Wuz (Almost) Robbed! Part 1

I slept late Saturday -- after 8 a.m.  Got up, fired up the old PC and started reading my email.

First thing that caught my eye was from PayPal.  "Your transaction is in process," it said.

What transaction?

I've been using PayPal for 7 or 8 years, ever since I first bought something on Ebay.  Lately my participation has been pretty scant, but PayPal is still handy for relatively hassle-free money transfer and charitable donations.  I've heard all sorts of horror stories about it, but have never had the least trouble with it.

Up until Saturday.

First of all, PayPal makes a huge deal about email.  Understandably so, I suppose.  But once you're clued in to the difference between a scam and the legitimate thing, it's fairly easy to tell them apart.  A couple of read-throughs just to be sure, and the next thing, I had logged onto my PayPal account.  Sure enough, there's a transaction "in process," whereby $20 or so is being transferred from my linked bank account into PayPal, with an estimated date of completion around the 22nd.

The problem is, I never authorized any such transaction.  And oh yes, I spent a fair amount of time thinking very carefully, just to make sure something hadn't slipped my increasingly slippery mind.

I will often wait until I amass a respectable sum in my PayPal account and then transfer it into the bank.  Or I will tell PayPal how much I want to send to someone, and they will draw the money from the bank and then send it on.  But I will never simply ask PayPal to transfer money out of my bank into PayPal for no particular reason.  So the "particular reason" became the urgent matter of the moment, with the deeper question, of course, being WHO set this up?   No one on this planet has authorized access to my PayPal account except me.  Not my husband, not my son, not my cat, and not my BFF.

So now that I was 100% up and my pulse was racing (while the coffee hadn't even finished brewing yet), I was on the phone, urgently trying to get hold of PayPal to find out WTF was going on.
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