Over the past week I received two emails from Paypal telling me that my request to withdrawal money was approved and there was going to be a transfer to my bank account. Great I thought, if I have a balance for a certain number of days, it will automatically be put into my checking account… no hassle, right?

I check my Paypal account yesterday and see that I received two payments for $3,200! Both of them were immediately transferred out to the bank account… however… checking my bank accounts, there was a Bank of America account that somehow mysteriously appeared. I only work with Fifth-Third… Weird….

So I called Paypal to report the activity. The first time I talked to someone, they weren’t very helpful, but after calling back, I got the answers I needed.

Apparently, someone hacked my Paypal account and was sending money to it from stolen credit cards and then withdrawing it to their account (or something like that). That way the credit card companies wouldn’t be able to trace where the payments were ending up.

Paypal said they would reverse the charges within 10 days. At the time of the phone call I had 30 dollars in my Paypal account, $26 of it, which was, actually mine.

Last night out of curiosity, I check my account again and see that I now have a balance of $6,298 and some change… HOLY COW! So they reversed the transaction from the bank account back to my Paypal account. Now I just have a whole lot of money sitting in my Paypal account…

… are you thinking what I’m thinking? …

What would happen if tried to withdrawal all this money to my checking account? Is that grounds of jail time? Haha… I didn’t steal the money, it just happened into my hands. These people with the credit cards didn’t have to pay the balance since their card was stolen and such… What do you think?

Haha… I wonder what would happen. Can I claim ignorance and say I didn’t think that’d be wrong, or that since the money was in my account, isn’t it technically mine?

If I were to steal credit cards and go through this scam/fraud, I would do things a little differently… I would deposit the $3,500 into someone’s Paypal account just as they did to my account. But then, here is the key… when this person withdrew the $3,500 I would have only withdrawn $2,900. Why not leave $600 in the Paypal account. That isn’t too much of the larger sum, and maybe the person with the Paypal account would keep their eyes looking the other direction if they are mysteriously getting all this cash. Eventually Paypal would catch on… but by then I would have already transferred more than enough money through that account, and just move on to the next one… Genius!

Someday, if my conscience ever decides to pack up and leave… maybe I’ll give it a shot. Until then… I guess I’ll keep my cursor away from the withdrawal button.

One more thought though… if I go a month and that money is still in my Paypal account… it is definitely past the 10 days Paypal said they would need… so is the money mine? Haha… let’s cross fingers, wait and see. Maybe this will turn from feeling completely violated to being in the right place at the right time.

Later!