Staying in touch with family and friends has gotten so much easier over the past decade. Like probably many of you, Marco and I use Skype for international calling, chatting, and video-conferencing. It’s free if both people are online and logged into their accounts and pretty cheap when you call just about any mobile or land-line anywhere in the world from your account. But is Skype secure? How do you deal with a hacked Skype account? And how can you use Skype more securely? Here is how we learned our lesson on using Skype and some recommendations based on our personal experiences with Skype.
via Wikimedia Commons
A Hacked Skype Account
Are there any security issues with Skype? You bet! Marco and I both had our Skype accounts set up to recharge automatically when the balance drops below a certain point (I think $2 if I remember correctly). It all went well for years…. until this week. Within one day Marco received six emails that his account had been credited through the automatic re-charge he set up via PayPal. He logged into his account and found that over the course of two days, someone had made hundreds of calls to various countries in Africa – using his credit. And since he had the automatic recharge set up, this someone could keep going and going and going until Marco cancelled the automatic recharge with PayPal and changed his password. Including the credit he had on the account and the six recharges, this whole mess cost him over $200. How much does that suck?!
He IM-ed Skype (because you cannot find a telephone number anywhere), they blocked his account and sent him a link to reset his password. That’s as far as they are willing to go apparently. He chatted with a customer representative and was told that his PC probably wasn’t secure and it was his own fault.The problem with this? He has an up-to-date anti-virus program that should prevent this type of problem. And nothing else has been hacked – neither his bank account, email accounts, nothing. Isn’t it instead at least possible that Skype had their system hacked? We don’t know. Skype should know who used Marco’s account to make all these calls because they should have access to the IP address used to log in. However, Skype doesn’t seem to care. They got paid for the calls that have been made and it looks as though that’s all they care about. It’s very frustrating!
PayPal to the Rescue
Luckily PayPal is a much more customer-friendly company. Marco marked the charges on PayPal as fraudulent and PayPal contacted Skype to figure out what was going on. It took about a week and PayPal refunded everything. Does it take a company to talk to a company? Who knows! Based on this experience it seems that if you use the automatic recharge process, it might seem safer to use an intermediary like PayPal than giving Skype your credit card information and using that for the automatic re-charge. We contacted Skype and they were unwilling to do anything. PayPal contacted Skype and was able to refund all our money.
Is Skype Safe? How You Can Protect Yourself While Using Skype
How can you protect yourself from somebody hacking into your Skype account? I am not sure. Apparently, it isn’t enough to only use Skype on your home computer on your protected internet connection and to have an alpha-numeric password and an anti-virus program installed.
So, if you seemingly can’t protect yourself from somebody hacking into your account, what can you do? Well, not use Skype of course… but I suspect that the problem is similar with other providers. We will keep our Skype accounts for the moment, but have taken some added precautions to prevent this from happening again.What steps can you take to protect yourself from having some idiot make calls around the world with your money?
- Don’t keep too much credit on Skype – whatever is on there is apparently fair game for any hacker. You might still lose whatever is on there, but at least you can limit your losses.
- Don’t sign up for the automatic recharge process. Whoever hacks in, can get unlimited money to make calls until you find out about it and cancel the never-ending supply of “free” money. Yes, it takes a few minutes to recharge your account manually and it is a hassle, but it could also end up saving you hundreds of dollars if your account ever gets hacked.
- If you go with the automatic re-charge, use PayPal. This simple step just saved us over $200.
Backing Up Your Skype Contacts
Want another tip on using Skype? Back up your contacts in Skype! When Marco did an upgrade recently, he lost all of his contacts. He contacted Skype and they were able to provide him with his old contact list… At least something good about Skype, right? 
Anyways, if you update your account and find yourself without your contacts, let Skype know. They can help you get those back.
How About You?
Did you ever have problems with Skype? Any tips and tricks on safely using Skype? Have you ever had a hacked Skype account? If so, what did you do? Are there other Skype security risks? Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments!
© 2011, Country Skipper. All rights reserved.
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This is so scary. I’m also signed up for the automatic recharge. I’ll be changing that after reading this post. Sad to hear that Skype’s customer service is so terrible. Thanks for sharing your experience and letting it be a warning for others.
Sure! I hope it’ll help some people avoid the problems we had. We’ll still use Skype, but we’ll be a little more careful with how we use it. Honestly, I’m just so happy that it was his account, because he used PayPal and they were able to help and refund the money. My account was just set up to recharge with my card… no longer though!
This is really interesting and helpful. I haven’t used Skype, but keep thinking I should with everyone else doing it. Thanks for the safety tips!
You should give it a try. It’s really useful – just be aware of the automatic re-charge pitfall and you should be ok
That is really interesting that Skype didn’t help you get the money back but Paypal did. I use Skype just for the computer to computer calls, but I think I have some credit on there. I haven’t used to auto-recharge feature, but I hope a hacker can’t get to your credit card information if you have just charged credit once. I guess it’s possible from your story. I will certainly take precautions with Skype.
I am not sure if somebody could get to your credit card information unless Skype, the company, gets hacked and you have that problem with every company where you have ever used your credit card to pay anything. I think the credit card that is saved in your Skype account is only shown partially, so if somebody hacks in your account, I don’t think they can use it. However, if you have the automatic re-charge enabled, then they could use your account to make endless phone calls. At least that’s how I understand it
I’m glad to hear that PayPal came through for you guys. That is a lot of money to throw away. I’m glad I never set up the automatic recharge with Skype. I’ve only paid for Skype for one trip and as soon as I got home I canceled it. Great tips!
Thank you! Yes, we owe PayPal big time. They have two completely loyal customers from now on… Skype on the othert hand? I’ll still use it because it makes communication with my friends and family fairly easy and cheap, but my opinion of them has changed. And I’ll use it much more carefully from now on as well. What do you use to stay in touch?
I’ve never had to pay to use Skype so far so I’ve not dealt with this situation. However, my PayPal account did get hacked and they were great at notifying me, putting a freeze, and making sure my money was refunded.
Another point for PayPal! They seem to be really great at customer service
I use Skype mainly for Skype-to-Skype calls which are free, but especially when i am on the road the Skype-to-phone calls make staying in contact with my family easier… especially those who are not at their computer a lot. And it’s still fairly cheap as most landline calls are only a few cents per minute.
I’ve never used skype for regular calls. So I’m not sure whether is this hacking problem also possible without having a recharge phone call account.
The only problem I had with skype was with my Windows-System. Sometimes the system has crashed.
And I’ve read, that skype can tap into your conversation.
They can? It wouldn’t really surprise me, but it still is a scary thought! I think people can hack into any Skype account, but if you don’t have the automatic recharge enabled, those hackers can’t get very far at least.
If a hacker can get into your Skype account, they can sign up for auto-recharge themselves. I just had the same thing happen, but my account had been closed. Received an email from Skype stating I signed up for auto-recharge. The funny thing is that I hadn’t even been on my account for awhile and hadn’t added credit since November of last year. My card was already cancelled so no charges went through. What I recommend is changing your password on a monthly/bi-monthly basis, like most jobs working with computers make you do. Using Paypal is a great idea as I couldn’t even find a phone number listed for Skype on its website.
Thanks for stopping by! Changing your password more often is a great suggestion! And probably one of the few that you can really easily implement. We couldn’t find a number for Skype either and were only able to live chat with them. Very disappointing for a company that sells VOICE services. Paypal on the other hand was great! They were supereasy to work with and solved the problem that Skype wasn’t even willing to look into.
My Skype account has been hacked about 5 times since Oct 29 2011 (about every 10 days) in spite of me reloading my Linux operating systems, using double firewalls and 15 character random passwords for both Skype and the registered email. This has rendered my Skype account almost unusable any ideas?
I’m no expert, but that sounds excessive! Sounds like they have a problem at their end and not you at yours… have you been able to get in touch with any of the Skype people and tell them about your problems?
Same thing happened with me. Lost £90 because someone used my account to call Africa 27 times in the space of a couple of hours. Skype never told me about it, in fact I only found out when the hacker changed the email on the account to theirs.
I managed to get into Skype quickly to change it back, but it was only when I saw my account balance I thought something was up. I too contacted “Customer Support” only to get the same “my fault” BS. I can’t believe people are giving Skype money when even the forum on their website is full of people who have been hacked (just Skype and no other site) in the same manner and are getting the same cold response from the support team.
I’ve lodged a complaint with PayPal but I am not sure they can help as I credited my account more than 3 months ago. But I guess if more people are complaining to then hopefully they can see that this is a common issue.
I hope Paypal will help you out like it helped us! What a pain this can be!! I’m so not going back to automatic recharge…