$11 billion PayPal payments stopped over scam concerns; company says: ‘We quickly identified…’

German banks have blocked PayPal payments totalling more than 10 billion euros ($11.7 billion) due to fraud concerns. The news agency Reuters cited the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung to report this development. The payments were halted earlier this week after lenders flagged millions of suspicious direct debits from PayPal that appeared last week. A banking source told Reuters that the value of the blocked payments was somewhere between hundreds of millions and billions of euros. According to the report, PayPal’s security system, which typically filters out fraudulent direct debits, was either “completely or largely disrupted” late last week, resulting in unvetted payments being sent to banks, the report explained.