I’ve been boycotting PayPal for at least a decade, so I am somewhat out of touch with how they operate. Out of the blue, I received a call at a phone number paypal would not know I had. A bot said:
“This is Paypal calling to confirm the purchase of an iPhone. Press 1 to confirm this order or 2 to cancel” (paraphrasing)
Is that normal? Of course what I would like to know is whether my number was entered by someone as a typo, or whether this signals a malicious act. Or whether the whole call was fabricated and Paypal does not do this. And if it’s a malicious act, am I the victim, or was my phone number randomly entered with someone else as the victim?
If #paypal were on the ball, there would be 3 choices (confirm, cancel [customer changes their mind], or transaction unexpected [i.e. fraud]).
#askFedi
PayPal does not do this. This is a phishing attempt
The chances of a call like that being legitimate are near zero regardless of the company. If you are not sure hang up anyway. Log into your account or call the company using a number from their website or something you know comes from the company like a billing statement.
If you haven’t used the account in a decade you should probably close it so that you don’t have to worry about scammers getting access to it.
In 20+ years of having a PayPal account, I’ve never received any phone calls from them for any reason. I use them regularly. The only thing they’d know about any purchase is who I purchased from, not what I purchased. Your robocall is not legit.
Added: you’d probably be sent to a scammer who would be trying to get money from you if you pressed a number.
No, they don’t do anything of the sort and “purchase of an iPhone” is a classic scammer sort of thing.
