I received a notice from PayPal saying my automatic payment of $5.00 was successful and had been sent to Photobucket.
I made no authorization for such a payment and opened up a claim. At the same time I contacted Photobucket and told them in no uncertain terms they’d hear from me if I did not get that $5.00 refunded. Actually, they’d be hearing from Bernstein Liebhard LLP, not me.
PayPal cancelled the autopay but said they could not verify I did not authorize it, hence they would not be refunding me.
This morning they notified me that Photobucket had refunded the $5.00.
So, the question is - is Photobucket trying this slick maneuver with anyone else who might still have photos languishing on their site?
Glad I pulled the plug on PirateBucket way back when they first started mugging folks! Surely Paypal must have a record of who exactly authorised the transaction? Poor show if they can’t pin that down…
It certainly wasn’t me, and Photobucket knows that. They clearly made a good decision in refunding me. That’s theft by deception, or just outright theft. At any rate, PayPal password already changed.
I don’t think PhotuPhuckers used your PP-password.
They probably used the same mechanisms used by other subscriptions.
How did they know about your PP-account? Did you ever, in the history of internet,
use PP to pay PB for anything at all?
Not that I recall. I only remember using it when it was free. But my memory, like my hair, is a fleeting thing. I certainly have not even thought about them in years. And the “recurring” fee was not happening before this month.
At least with PayPal and Discover card there is a place to find auto pay subscriptions. I am still fighting Micro-Adobe-McAfee-whatever that claims I signed up. Usually these a simple outright scams, but I endure the constant fight in order to keep convenient on line ordering available. When are DOGE and Chick-Filet going to be empowered to start running things correctly?
Speaking of McAfee, when I bought this computer earlier this year I sarted getting notices that my computer was infected. One said I had visited over 47 forbiddden sites. Another that I had all sorts of malicious malware on the computer. I hadn’t even had time to visit any porn sites!
The Geek at Best Buy assured me it was not a problem - I have some other sort of anti-virus program that came installed on the computer when I purhased it. Speaking of things already installed, he qualified his next statement by saying the McAffee alerts were “probably” pre-installed - to get you to purchase their software. He was able to turn off the notices ina matter of seconds. I don’t think it was his first time.
My wife had the same issue with her computer a few years back.
Scared the h-ll out of her.
MacApe are hopefully having a hard time now that the embedded safety features
in Windows are getting better.
It might be worth buying another computer to find out. If you get te same messages after a week of never getting online, sounds like the basis of a pretty hefty lawsuit,
I received constant emails from Photobucket about my photos at risk of being deleted because I haven’t logged in or paid for my account in decades.
My free Photobucket account is so old, it dates way before gMail was created…like 1990-2000s old. I just have a few model figure kit review photos that are so ancient that I don’t even think I have that figure anymore (I believe I sold it. It was a white metal cast review sample).
I doubt Photobucket will actually delete my photos due to legal or whatever reasons as they’re still my property. And with storage space being in the gigabit and terabit these days, Photobucket should have plenty of storage space for just a dozen of my long forgotten photos.
I don’t intend to do anything to my Photobucket account as forums these days don’t even need a photo account…just copy and paste into the text box. I sure as heck am not going to pay for a service that I no longer need, and the Photobucket interface is so clunky now that I don’t even know how to delete my account.
These days, a lot of online services are behind a paywall, or the service wants you to pay. I feel that these services are redundant and looking for revenue to stay alive and relevant. With the new Armorama interface, I don’t even need an online photo album anymore…and I rarely write model kit reviews too, unfortunately.
I also keep getting emails from PB to retrieve my photos. I have nothing important in their storage. Its been many years since I cancelled my subscription with them. I just delete their messages.
I’ve got the same. I did put a few photos on Photobucket when I first joined Armorama, but haven’t looked at Photobucket for years and I get the same emails. I just delete them, I refuse to engage. I don’t even want to log on to check what they are, I’m sure they are stored elsewhere anyway, so if they delete them, so be it.
Phuc Photobucket… I still consider what they did when they changed over ALL of their accounts to fee-charged accounts to have been nothing more than corporate extorsion. The bast@rds knew that most people had hundres or thousands of images loaded up on their site, and that most would believe they had no option but to pay up (or get their metaphorical windows smashed out). I lost hundreds of not several thousands of hours of work on scale modeling content that was posted on free sites because of Phucbucket because I wouldn’t pay up.
On the other hand, I get near daily fraudulent invoices from various scammers from PayPal. So, it’s possible that the money charge didn’t actually come from Phucbucket but rather from some scammer (not that there’s much difference…)
The only thing I’ve found that helps is to change my password and account email address from time to time. I also forward every one of them to:
I don’t know if PayPal actually does anything with the forwarded fraud invoices, but presumably they take some action.
I’ve also never had any difficulty with PayPal getting my money back from a “bad” transaction - as long as I did not pay using “Friends and Family.” Nobody wants to pay the credit card transaction fee, but you’re on thin ice if you pay for “goods and services” using “friends and family.” You’re going to pay the fee if you send money using f&f, so you might as well get the seller to add that charge to the price and pay it that way - especially with sellers you don’t know or for large amounts of money.
