Synchrony Bank Credit Account letter

[mistymue]

I received a letter from Synchrony Bank indicating that I applied for a PayPal Credit account in December.  I did not.  It was denied, thankfully, but this disturbs me.   There is no number to call, not that I would call it anyway, and only lists a reference number.  I did see on the Internet that PayPal uses Synchrony Bank and they are a legit bank. 

Has anyone else received a letter like this?

[LFG2]

I got one too.  It disturbs me that there is no phone number to call.  It clearly suggests that someone used my name and what other personal info to apply for a PayPal to open a credit card.  I should be able to call the bank and find out what info.

[PayPal_Marina]

Hi @mistymue and @LFG2,

I can understand how concerning it would be to receive a letter from Synchrony Bank when you did not apply for PayPal Credit. In that situation, it would be best to contact our Customer Support team directly for this to be further investigated.

Thank you for bringing this to our attention.

- Marina

[cleesf]

I also got a letter from Synchrony Bank today (01/21/2022) stating that I had recently requested to open a PayPal Credit account and that it was not approved.  I followed PayPal Moderator's (Marina) suggestion to contact PayPal's customer support team and her link took me to a webpage with options on how to contact PayPal.  I first chose "Message us" and that was a waste of time because it's just an automated response bot so after some back and forth they said to call PayPal's customer service number. When I spoke to PayPal's customer service, they transferred me to Synchrony Bank's fraud line and they said it sounded like fraud and they alerted the credit agencies. Because this is not the first time I've read this on the community boards, I'm concerned it's a widespread PayPal security breach. Synchrony Bank is just responding to a credit application so the initiation has to come from the PayPal side.

Oh, to add insult to injury, when I participated in PayPal survey and obviously gave poor scores, I hit the submit button and the response was "An error occurred, and your survey response was not submitted." 

[HorseDad]

Same exact thing.  I got a letter today. PANIC!   Nothing is on my credit report, no new accounts, not even a credit check (everyone, I recommend signing up for a Identity theft protection service, if only to have this info readily available).   Will do so for the next few weeks to make sure nothing shows up.   I guess this is a good thing that the Synchrony Bank folks (assuming it came from them) caught this.  

I will follow the process and talk to the support folks here as outlined. 

[clrogers]

I received one of these letters today. Has anyone been able to find out what's going on?

[racheljessie]

I got two similar letters. One stating that I had been approved for a PayPal Credit account (This was in Feb of 2022. Unfortunately, it got thrown out for reasons obvious later) and one dated 5/4/2022 that said my account is overdue. Both looked legit and had phone numbers to call. When I received the first one, I checked my account and found nothing suspicious (even had an add for PayPal Credit, so that made me disregard it) and went as far as to call PayPal customer service from a phone number found online and they were not able to find anything with my information. The first letter said that the bills would be sent to an email address that was not mine, so I had further reason to disregard it and I did not hear anything else for a few months. The overdue letter does not contain information like how much I owe and how long I am overdue and when I called the number on the letter itself, I got a message similar to the one for the legit number I found on the internet (I did not go further than the "Thank you for calling Paypal Credit" part). Further digging into if other scams also showed me that others have been told that PayPal does not send physical letters, however, I was not told this when I called the credit help line. Hopefully this helps others who get letters similar to this