PayPal President’s Credit Card Gets Hacked – Well Deserved?

PayPal is a bit like Marmite (Yeast Extract/Vegemite depending on where you are in the world), you’ll either love it or hate it. If you’ve spent any amount of time involved in internet shopping (or internet selling) you’ll have heard all the horror stories about PayPal freezing people’s accounts for no reason, sometimes even shutting people out of their own accounts and then expecting people to provide a wide range of personal documents to fix PayPal’s mistake. People’s accounts have been frozen for days, weeks, months and in some extreme cases even years. Why do PayPal do it? Who knows? Suggestions range from them trying to earn interest on frozen balances to them having genuine security concerns with certain accounts.

Well it seems PayPal have had a bit of Karma bestowed on them as their president, David Marcus, had his credit card cloned in the UK. Since then the fraudster has gone on a spending spree and run up huge bills on the credit card. Though the Karma is a bit short lived when you realise that PayPal would have prevented the problem from occurring since PayPal masks card numbers during a transaction effectively making “skimmers” (devices that clone cards) useless. Although it’s worth noting most credit card companies would also fix the problems that result from credit card fraud so either way David Marcus won’t be losing any money.

Image courtesy of Businessinsider.com.au