Not Sure What to Make of This - Might want to read if you use paypal or alertpay

[Bungalobill]

I opened up an Alertpay account at the beginning of the week. This was done to pay for an order from a vendor who accepts Alertpay. I used the same email address for Alertpay as I do for Paypal.

Yesterday (August 19) I got bombarded by alerts from Paypal. At first I thought it was a phishing thing. I hadn't used paypal in a while but out of curiosity I logged on to my account as I didn't trust the links in the emails.

Turns out the emaisl were genuinely from paypal. Someone with IP addresses associated with Serbia and another place I had never heard of made several attempts to log in to my paypal account based on email address.

I realize that unless somebody either didn't care or was just plain stupid, the IP address location means nothing. I can choose from a list of countries when I log on to my VPN.

What bothers me is the timing. I'm NOT ACCUSING ANYONE (did I make that plain enough?). I open an Alertpay account, make a vendor payment, my paypal account gets bombarded (both have strong but different passwords) by someone who isn't me (Hey .. this may have been the historic real first legitimate use of SWIM).

Seriously .. it did happen. The timing may be pure coincidence. The computer I used is also used by my kids who download stuff I wish they wouldn't. My firewall and antivirus are up to date and top of their class (depending on whose review you read and when you read it). The machine is dual boot and unfortunately was running under Windows and not booted under Linux (my bad). I do some sleuthing tonight and see if thats where the breach was.

If anybody has account with both Alertpay and paypal where you use the same email address ... you may want to switch that around. Fortunately in my case, nothing bad happened (as far as I can tell so far). The email address I used is one associated with a domain I pay for, and thats all I use that email address for. It's not in wide circulation.

The whole thing could be coincidence but I'm thinking not. Once again, no fingers are being poited anywhere right now.

Be careful out there.

[waterlogged]

I too have an alert pay and a paypal acct but with different passwords and have not had this happen to me but it has been awhile since I have used my alertpay acct. Thanks for the heads up, I will be on the lookout for this!

[Bungalobill]

@waterlogged,
Fortunately I use differenter passwords for everything .. but from now on I'm using different email addresses. I got really familair with the 'Forgot my Passowrd' on sites I didn't use much until I stumbled upon a wonderful tool from the open source community called 'KeePass' a secure password safe.

[knocker]

@Bungalobill,
I also use KeePass. It eliminates the temptation to use the same password over and over. I highly recommend it to anyone who doesn't already use such a tool. It runs on Windows, Linux and Android and I can share my password database between each device.

[smithieh]

Coincidence? Highly unlikely in my experience, unless you are doing this every other day. Trust your intuition. A new vendor for you it seems. Do you have to accuse someone to add a timely caution? Now where did I see that Alertpay things again. Any more info?