You think that with PayPal being one of the major targets of targeting phishing in spam e-mail, they would think that sending you an e-mail to advise that your account has been suspended, click here to login and find out more isn't the right way to go about it. Yet this is exactly what I got from them a couple of months ago.

For some reason PayPal decided it would be appropriate to randomly freeze my account until I provided further identification such as passport, drivers licence and utility bills even though I have been a verified and "premium" member for over 3 years previous, had a grand total of AUD$7.49 in my account and had not conducted any unusual or large transactions in the past ever - my last 3 months of using PayPal I had conducted approximately AU$60 of transactions in total.

For the first 10 seconds I was looking at the message, I assumed it was spam like the rest - but then I noticed some things that made it seem legitimate:

  1. It was sent to the email account registered with my PayPal account.
  2. It had some of my personal information from the account that a spammer wouldn't know from just my e-mail address.

So I opened up my browser, typed in 'paypal.com' and logged in, and well what do you know, my account is frozen until I provide further identification. I further verified this through several (heated) phone conversations.

I refuse to provide so much personal information to PayPal just because they randomly decided that I'm no longer good enough to conduct business with until they knew more information about me than my doctor knows about me.

In conclusion; Screw You PayPal. You can go and suck a fat one. You're not getting another cent out of me.