I have used PayPal for a few years, mainly because paying with it was more convenient than using directly my credit card, even if the PayPal exchange rates were disadvantageous.

For a few years, PayPal worked fine and I was a satisfied customer. Than it had some kind of breach of security. The credit card known to PayPal was charged with a large number of small fraudulent transactions.

I did not loose any money, because within hours my bank alerted me about unusual activity and I blocked the card and refused the transactions.

Then I got a new credit card. Soon after making another payment through PayPal, similar fraudulent charges appeared again.

After obtaining and then cancelling 3 or 4 new credit cards, the causal relationship between making a payment through PayPal and a third party receiving my credit card details became obvious.

I have stopped making payments through PayPal and I have never had any credit card fraud problems again.

I have no idea about how my PayPal account was accessed by whoever was behind this. The only thing that I am certain about, is that it was not possible to guess my PayPal password, which was a long string of random characters and which had never been used for anything else except for logging into that PayPal account. Therefore I believe that it was some sort of inside job within PayPal.

Because I have never used again PayPal during the last 3 years, I do not know if there was any improvement in their security procedures.