About 3 or 4 years ago PayPal added the option to buy cryptocurrency, which I thought I’d try. (Dumb idea 🙄)
Part of the sign up process was glitched. I retried and clicked submit one too many times, I guess. Now I’ve been unable to use PayPal for years. They blocked me because THEIR SITE was broken, but the web page essentially accuses me of being a criminal and asks for my bank records. No way in hell.
This was just for me to pay others. I can only imagine how awful PayPal is if you are a vendor.
Fuck PayPal.
I never even provided my phone number to Paypal, then one day they started requiring me to use it to verify logins.
Two factor authentication for a financial website sounds like a good idea to me.
Sure, but where did they get my phone number from???
It’s like Facebook locking you out of your account and requiring you to present government ID, which they’ve never seen before and thus cannot use to prove ownership of the account. The request itself is a thinly veiled fish for more valuable information.
That I couldn’t tell you.
A phone number is not a factor of security, doesn’t matter how much every scummy data harvesting company tries to gaslight you into thinking it is, it fundamentally can never be.