Hackers are mysteriously stealing from PayPal accounts for online shopping

Over the last few days, a number of PayPal users took to the company's own forums as well as social media platforms like Reddit and Twitter to report unauthorized payments from their accounts.

They claimed that the mysterious transactions - revealed from their PayPal account history - were made using their Google Pay account for buying random products online.

Going by the reports, cited by ZDNet, most of the mysterious transactions were carried out at stores in the US, particularly at Target stores, while a majority of the targeted users were those hailing from Germany and Russia.

The complaints go in the scale of dozens and the amount stolen so far is estimated to be around tens of thousands of dollars.

The case of hackers breaking into PayPal and making unauthorized payments challenges the core of the payments service.

It is not exactly clear how the threat actors are doing this or what kind of bug they are exploiting to get into accounts.

However, security researcher Markus Fenske suggests the problem might be associated with PayPal's virtual card-based integration of Google Pay for contactless payments.

PayPal says it's looking into the unauthorized transactions but has not given an answer to explain how exactly the money was stolen from the accounts.

"The security of customer accounts is a top priority for the company," a company spokesperson told ZDNet. "We are reviewing and assessing this information and will take any appropriate actions that are deemed necessary to further protect our customers."