Has this happened to you?

Pay-pal? I set mine up back in 2002, so I don’t really remember. But, I’ve never had any issues with Pay Pal.

Were the fake warnings “from” PayPal (as in, branded to look like a PayPal email), or were they from other actual banking institutions?

Regardless, what you are experiencing is most definitely confirmation bias (you may have received other scam emails in the past, but only now do you pay attention to the PayPal ones because only now do you have an account there). The main other alternative, PayPal voluntarily sharing your email address with scammers, is quite ludicrous considering how sketchy the company is, I would give this a 1% chance. The third alternative, PayPal having their data stolen from them, is slightly plausible but such a data breach usually makes the e-news, thus the lack of news means I doubt this is the answer.

When it comes to phishing (the technical term for this method of spamming), phishers send out hundreds of millions of emails purposing to be “from” all of the major banks. It’s a simple case of odds and statistics – the more they send, the higher the chance is that a user will be fooled into believing these emails are true.

Then again, if you signed up with PayPal, perhaps you also used this email for eBay, and someone may have taken your email address from there and added it to the big list for spammers to use.

Bottom line, I find it extremely improbable that your increase in phishing spam was due to creating a PayPal account.

i only started to receive the ones from banks when i started up PayPal i always watch the scam emails.
there was two set up to look like PayPal but the rest are from named well known banks.
was just wondering if anyone else has same happen to them or if i am just unlucky.

tho i must add i find it funny the scam emails i love getting them and having a chuckle

Odds are extremely high that you are just unlucky.

I’m glad you have a chuckle at the emails, and are not suckered into them. I cringe inside ok, I cringe outside too each time I hear of a granny who lost all her money to “a nice prince from Nigeria”.

“oh he was every so nice to me, and all he asked for was a little money to get it started.”
its soo sad that people fall for it its even sadder that people start these scams .

I also get those fake bank emails warnings. But i don’t think its related to Pay-Pal its just some scam artist

Well if I were living in a country as broken and corrupt as Nigeria, I would likely be doing these scams too. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

it is a wonder why i only started to get them right after i signed up with PayPal
there was one email from “PayPal” that said i had funds for being a user that was also fake,
cause when i used the PayPal website rather than the link in the email,my account had no funds accepted.
@dynamicduo if they are soo poor these nigeria scammers how is it they can afford computers/ computer time . i wouldnt put it past millionaires to be chancing there luck at getting some extra green

It’s not millionaires, Sandy. Millionaires don’t need to scam their way into more money, let alone the backlash that would happen if it was found out. More bluntly, millionaires are generally smart people, and these scams are incredibly dumb to perpetrate. I can say with 99.99999% 9 repeating accuracy that these scams are never perpetrated by millionaires.

Nigeria is considered the hotbed of scammer activity for many reasons. One, there are no anti-scamming laws, or they are very weakly enforced (many countries in Africa are very very corrupt – it’s one sad side effect from Bono and other efforts to simply give them money instead of giving them the knowledge to let them make their own money [the money rarely makes it past the corrupt government]), thus allowing many Nigerians to pursue scamming. Regarding computers, there are many computer cafes that they can go to and use a computer, or they will share one computer between many scammers. Once the scammer scams the first small payment from the person, that’s more than enough money to bankroll hours on a computer, and as long as some funds keep trickling in, scams keep flooding out.

Reading the question, I thought this was going to be an infomercial.

I got a fake email from “PayPal” once. I reported it to the real PayPal and forwarded the email. That was that. If you believe there’s a prince in another country that needs money then a “PayPal” scam will screw you, however, if you’re smart you have nothing to worry about.