@tadpoletrading wrote:
Just wanted to warn people
I sold 5 items Friday night. I checked paypal account. Money on hold. (Never had money held even when I first started selling) so, clicked on expected release date:. 1969! Ok, don't panic, it was late, call Sat. I checked again, same issue. Figured a glitch.
It was; it's a glitch occasionally seen on PayPal when their expected payment clearing date doesn't calculate correctly. A Linux operating system counts from January 1, 1970 as being its nominal "Day 0" from which all later dates are counted. If its own system fails to provide the correct date number for today, it tries to work with "Day 0" instead. It calculates using Greenwich Mean Time, which you're a few hours behind, so instead of telling you that the payments are expected to clear on January 1, 1970, it backs it up to your time zone and tells you that your clearance date will be December 31, 1969.
Funds were paid (still on hold). Decided to print labels first.
I would not suggest doing that before the payment(s) actually clear. Even if you had a Ship-To address to work with, there's no point in buying postage on a pending payment that might get cancelled. If that doesn't happen soon enough, you'd have to wait a lot longer for the USPS to refund you for the unused label(s) (if they refund at all at that late stage; I'm not sure).
When I hit print, my computer froze, huge warning " you are being hacked, all accounts compromised, call Microsoft, do not turn off computer". In addition it was " screaming" that at me. I know the phone scams, never saw this. Luckily, I was able to turn off computer. Took it to my IT service. I was more freaking out because I had PayPals site up, with customers names addresses. IT guy said it was okay, I cut their ability to go far. Yes a virus got loaded on computer, possibly through PayPal or eBay, but never will know.
It's actually a malicious script that was running; it did indeed get in via a downloaded ad from a nefarious website, but that could have happened anytime in the past; they sometimes lay dormant for a while to make it difficult to figure out which ad or site delivered it to your machine.
Your machine was not frozen (among other things, it would need to keep running in order to do the popup warning, play the audio at you, etc.), but its graphics covered up everything else on your screen, so you really had no way of knowing that at the time. Because it's just a script running in a full-screen window, all you needed to do (just FYI for next time, of course) is press Alt+F4 (hold down your Alt key while pressing your F4 key; the universal window-closing command), which would have closed out the malicious script and restored your normal display. A good anti-virus cleaning should get rid of it. Ask your computer place what they recommend, and you may be able to get a "home" version that's either free or inexpensive.
I called PayPal, first, yes, date was a glitch. But no way the virus came from their site. Called eBay. Impossible.. Went on PayPal through phone. Somehow they (scammers) we're able to add my mom's card to my PayPal account and charged it 300.00. and remove my bank account info!!
There's some point of overlap between you and your mom's activity. Your machine may have a keylogger infection (in addition to the fun stuff above) which would note all account logins run on your machine. If you ever accessed your account via your mom's computer, same result.
I can't pinpoint all the bad stuff described here, but a computer place you trust should examine both your machine and your mom's, clean them both out, and give you advice on periodic preventive cleanups in the future. Good luck.
