Payment Processing Company Recently Acquired By PayPal Confirms Breach

Earlier in the summer, the payment service provider PayPal purchased a payment processing company called TIO. This week, it was announced that TIO suffered a data breach of its systems resulting in unauthorized access of a lot of accounts. That’s the bad news. There is some positive news, however. The PayPal systems themselves were not connected to TIO's and therefore were not affected.

PayPal had suspended operations for TIO as the company looked into the possibility of a data breach. Unfortunately, it was a reality and 1.6 million accounts were affected.

Those with TIO accounts should be on the lookout for targeted phishing email messages. Be particularly suspicious of any of them that ask you to update your account data, particularly login and password information or payment card details. Don’t click on links in such messages. Go directly to your account and modify anything necessary there.

TIO is notifying affected customers and offering free credit monitoring services. If you are one of these customers, take advantage of this service, if you don’t have an active one already. If you do, pay attention to the expiration date of that one and try to stack them so you are consistently covered.

Remember that if you have applied a credit freeze to your reports, a credit monitoring service will not be of value. That is because they must acquire your credit report to monitor it. Don’t unfreeze credit just for this. However, if you haven’t frozen your reports and would like to, activate the credit monitoring service first, then freeze them.

Freezing your credit reports will eliminate the possibility of anyone opening credit in your name. This includes you. So, take note of this before doing so. Also, some states allow the bureaus to charge for the initial freeze and to unfreeze and refreeze. If you are actively seeking credit, this may not be the option for you.

PayPal is taking additional actions to secure the TIO systems. For more information and updates, check out the TIO website.

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