I just got a scam email from someone trying to hijack your personal information using PayPal as decoy.

The scammers will try to give you the impression that your PayPal account has been limited and you need to provide them with some additional information to prove you are actually you. This email wasn't sent to my real PayPal email address and that was the thing that got me digging deeper into this. The scary thing is that they had already my full name and my address.

Dear [my full name] ,

PayPal Resolution Center: Your account is limited.

Why is my account access limited?

As part of our security measures, we regularly screen activity in the PayPal system. During a recent screening, we noticed an issue
regarding your account:

Our system detected unusual number of invalid logging attempts on your account from these blacklist ip address.

(Your case ID for this reason is PP-XXXXXXX)

How can I restore my account access?

For your protection, we have temporary suspended access to your account until additional security measures can be completed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. In order to assist us with this security measure, we ask that you send us a photocopy or scan of one document from each of the three categories listed below and return them via email to security@paypalcompany.com :

- A clear copy of your Passport, Photographic Drivers License or I.D. Card (both sides).

- A clear copy of both sides of the credit/debit card on your paypal profile.

- A clear copy of a recent bank statement or utility bill on which your name and address ( [my correct address]
) are clearly visible and less than 3 months old.

Completing all of the checklist items we will manually restore your account access.

Thank you for using PayPal!
The PayPal Security Department

——————————

——-

Please do not reply to this email. This mailbox is not monitored and you will not receive a response. For assistance, log in to your PayPal account and click the Help link located in the top right corner of any PayPal page.

PayPal Email ID PP-XXXXXXX.

In this Sunday series we're continuing our trip back to 2001.

Payments

In 2001 Paypal had already seen the daylight, however they where so far not widely spread so not everyone used them. So to accept payments you would have to use a company to accept credit cards, receive a check for your monthly payments, cash it in and then use your own credit card to pay hosting fees etc. Today I can't even remember how we could live like that

I think Clickbank was the number 1 popular company to accept payments online and I got my first account with them in 2001. At that time they didn't accept multiple currencies, couldn't work with subscriptions and you had to wait for your pay-check to arrive by snail mail . Today they've evolved in a good way. They can work with several currencies, subscriptions are possible, you don't have to wait for a check any more since you can get paid by wire transfer. Since they also accept Paypal transfers today I have to say that they are prefect (not everyone like Paypal so by using Clickbank you can offer direct credit card payments with out going thru PayPal).

The best thing with Clickbank is that they actually offer wire transfers so you no longer have to wait for your check, since checks can get lost in the mail and you have to wait longer before you actually got the money in your hand. So I actually love the development where more and more companies are offering ACH or wire transfers to pay affiliate commissions etc.

PayPal existed, but they didn't have many of the features they got today . In the beginning they only accepted users from US, which meant that you couldn't send or receive money outside US. They didn't have that many currencies you could charge your customers in (only USD ). I got my PayPal account in 2002 so I guess they started accepting non-US account holders in the end 2001 or beginning 2002.

Did you by the way know that PayPal was actually called X.com in the beginning?

So the summary of 2001 is that it was hard to send payments online and it was almost completely impossible to send micro-payments.

In part one I wrote about the new top level domains that started accepting registrations back in 2001 and this time I'm actually going to write a little bit about Xavier Media. After all Xavier Media celebrated it's 5th birthday in December 2001

Xavier Media

In 2001 we (Xavier Media) focused a lot of our energy on CGI and PHP scripts. Most of our scripts where completely free for you to use since we earned all our money from WebSponsors (i.e. ads). During 2001 the Internet crisis started to get really real since companies applied for chapter 11 almost daily and that affected unfortuatly the advertising market alot. Many of the high paying companies using WebSponsors simply just stopped existing and with them many of our income streams . At this time we where simply forced to start charging for some of our scripts like Cookie Password protection. Luckily PayPal had been launched about a year earlier so it was quite easy to start charging for products and services.

CyberGold was one of the companies that couldn't continue their business model. They paid people a small amount ("Cyber Gold") to visit companies pages, answer questions about ad campaigns etc. The "CyberGold" you earned could then be used to pay for different stuff in their web shop.

At that time we earned 90% of all our money from them so it was a really hard slap in the face when they cancelled their ad campaigns. Luckily our strategy to charge a small fee for our scripts paid off and we're still in business CyberGold became a part of MyPoints.com…..

Check out the history of CyberGold.com in the Way-back Machine: CyberGold.com

Our main web site XavierMedia.com

XavierMedia.com was the main part of our network and we got closer to the design we use today . OK, the site didn't really look like today since this design is from 2007, but we started using the colors we use today: blue, blue, blue and of course the color blue

The design above is actually version 4 and today we use version 6 , so we did a lot of changes to our design in the beginning.

We didn't have any official logo back then, the famous X was created about at this time but not used on the Internet until later.

Blogs and forums

Blogs where almost an unknown word in 2001. I know .NU had some campaign about that time where you could upgrade your .NU domain to a blog-like service, but I didn't really see any need for such service at all. Most Xavier Media pages where hard coded at that time (you had to edit the code directly to do changes and upload the files by FTP).  Wordpress didn't even exist!!!! All site owners got it way too easy these days when they don't even have to know HTML anymore to have a web site .

I guess the most popular and high-tech software you could use back then was phpBB forums. The first time I installed phpBB I was really impressed by how easy the installation was. Today it's pretty much the same technology as back then……so they could use a complete re-do to get for example better plugin support and perhaps also better anti-spam features.

When did you start using blogs and forums?