Current mood:	embarrassed
Entry tags:	family, lj

name revert
ROFL! i'm back to being losethesmog. XD



so about a week ago, my brother abram checked his e-mail and got a notification from paypal that there was suspicious activity on his paypal account. he panicked and went, "asdjhfasdhk i just signed up and already i got someone doing identity theft on me!!"

he double-checked his account, and said suspicious activity was for a livejournal rename token. and he thought to himself, "no, wait a minute.."

you guessed it right, people: i am the identity thief. ROFLMAO.

i logged in his paypal account myself because he said he didn't know how LJ worked with paypal, so i used his paypal account to complete the transaction with LJ.

well, apparently, paypal checks their transactions to make sure that the account holders themselves are the ones using the accounts. they detected that the IP used to make the transaction for the rename token was an IP in the philippines, and since my brother's registered address is in california, they assumed his account was compromised and shut it down. >.> FTL!

he lamented about going through a horrible verification process with paypal (who wanted to make sure he had full control of his account) and making someone angry at ebay because he won something (an original Tales of Destiny 2 CD!!) but wasn't able to pay immediately because of the paypal mishap. i was really truly very sorry, i told him i didn't really know about paypal's tight policies. >.< he told me it was fine, everything's sorted out, and at least we were assured that paypal is really paranoid about identity theft and that they have such measures.

i discovered the issue myself because i got notification today that my LJ got reverted back to losethesmog due to the paypal problem. i called my brother about it and he told me the full story as narrated above. in the end, he still got me a rename token (bless your kind heart, darling ♥). he just did so by making an LJ account of his own and then just gifting the token to my account. i tried to rename my LJ back to kmja, but it won't rename: kmja got deleted because of the reversed transaction and i have to wait 30 days for the name to be purged from LJ's database. >.>

my brother and i had a good laugh about it; he told me that that was his revenge at me for making him go through the whole ordeal. >.> in the end, it's okay if i have to wait for 30 days. the rename token won't go away anyway (i hope!), and at least we have time to make sure that there are no mishaps this time.

in any case, we were wondering if there was a way to inform paypal that i can use my brother's account without need for such measures. i don't plan on using his paypal anytime in the near future, but my brother did wish to have that freedom, wherein he can just tell us to use his paypal account in case we wanted something that can be bought cheaper from the US or online, instead of him having to go through the transactions himself.

hmm. this horrifying experience just really goes to show i should get my own credit card and paypal account already. >.>