C'mon PayPal - get your act together!
Posted: Sat Aug 27, 2022 7:25 am
So, for the first time in a long time, I used my PayPal account for a couple different transactions over the past week.
I used it to transfer money from a shopping rewards app to my checking account, and I also used it to claim a free $8 from PayPal.
To confirm ACH electronic transfer ability, PayPal made two immaterial deposits into my checking account. Not at all unusual. This is rather standard procedure when setting up online banking or account transfer ability.
Here's where it gets interesting - the auto-generated email sent to my email address notifying me of the test deposits, and instructing me to go back to paypal.com to enter each of the two deposit amounts to complete the account setup process - contained two or three glaring grammatical errors! Immediately, I thought it could be a phishing email. As such, I definitely did NOT click on any link in the email message, even though the underlying URL (when hovering over it) came from the paypal.com domain.
Instead, I opened a fresh browser session, went to paypal.com, logged in as usual, and was given the option of confirming the two small deposit amounts that way. (A tile appeared on my dashboard page upon log in.)
The point I'm making is this - if you are going to use offshore help to aid in software programming, as PayPal is clearly doing, why not have at least some QUALITY CONTROL so that legitimate email messages cannot be mistaken for malignant PHISHING attempts? (Rant mode off.)
I used it to transfer money from a shopping rewards app to my checking account, and I also used it to claim a free $8 from PayPal.
To confirm ACH electronic transfer ability, PayPal made two immaterial deposits into my checking account. Not at all unusual. This is rather standard procedure when setting up online banking or account transfer ability.
Here's where it gets interesting - the auto-generated email sent to my email address notifying me of the test deposits, and instructing me to go back to paypal.com to enter each of the two deposit amounts to complete the account setup process - contained two or three glaring grammatical errors! Immediately, I thought it could be a phishing email. As such, I definitely did NOT click on any link in the email message, even though the underlying URL (when hovering over it) came from the paypal.com domain.
Instead, I opened a fresh browser session, went to paypal.com, logged in as usual, and was given the option of confirming the two small deposit amounts that way. (A tile appeared on my dashboard page upon log in.)
The point I'm making is this - if you are going to use offshore help to aid in software programming, as PayPal is clearly doing, why not have at least some QUALITY CONTROL so that legitimate email messages cannot be mistaken for malignant PHISHING attempts? (Rant mode off.)