How to donate, PayPal hacked

[Ole Anderson]

I have been donating via PayPal a nominal amount to Northwind (Sawmill Creek) for years. A few weeks ago my account got hacked to the tune of about a hundred $1200 charges. Not sure of the term "spoofed?" where the charges (invoices) appeared to be going through Northwind. PayPal cancelled the transactions and said I should cancel my PayPal account which I did. Northwind is the only recurring PayPal charge I have. Obviously I am soured now on PayPal.

I will add that I responded to an email from "PayPal" saying to call them due to fraudulent activity. The email appeared to come from a PayPal address (service@paypal.com) so I felt somewhat confident in responding. But the more I talked to the "agent" the more suspicious I became. This guy was good, but finally I disconnected and went to my actual PayPal account to see if there were any withdrawals, there weren't, just a hundred pending transactions at which point I called the number on the PayPal website. In retrospect I should have checked my account first and verified the correct phone number.

So, what other ways can you donate to keep up the advantages of supporting the Creek?

[Jim Becker]

You can send a check if you wish...the details are in the Donate page if you scroll down to the bottom. You can also use a CC...while the transaction is done through the PayPal system, it doesn't require having an account...they are just doing the CC processing.

[Jackie Outten]

Ole

Sorry to hear that your paypal account was hacked. You must have been so frustrated. You can still use paypal to process your card without having an account.

The only other option we have is to mail a check to Northwind Associates, Inc., 8770 Little England Road, Hayes, Va 23072.

Thank you for your support of our forum.

Jackie Outten

[roger wiegand]

Sorry to hear about that. In general I'd counsel never clicking on any link or calling a number that you get by text or email, especially as relates to anything financial. Call the number on the back of your card, or navigate to the company web site independently by typing in the name or web address. There are too many, too clever scams out there to take the risk. I've had fraudulent emails that took me 20 minutes to figure out the scam-- I know, that's sick, but it's kind of fun to see how clever some of them are. Love the insertion of a character in a name or web address from another alphabet that looks like a roman character to us but completely different to a computer.

[Bill Howatt]

Was PayPal really hacked or was the OP Phished by a fake email appearing as if it came from PayPal? It isn't totally clear - I can see both perspectives.