I've had a PayPal account for many years that's linked to my credit card and which I've used a few times over the years without anything odd happening. I used it for the first time yesterday however to sign up for one month's worth of premium access on RapidShare. edit: (I meant to say that I'd used it for the first time in a while yesterday)

Within a few hours, I received a phishing email with the PayPal logo at the top telling me they'd detected unusual credit-card activity with my account and that, for my own safety, they'd suspended it. They provided a link to go to a 'login and reactivate' page, which when I hovered over it, I discovered was the following: http://happythoughts.com/images/products/paypal-update-profile.com/Login.php

The timing involved was too perfect to be coincidental, especially as I've never had any spam or phishing emails sent to the email address I use for PayPal (it's the one I use for all financial communication, and which I don't use for anything else).

So it seems like it either originated from RapidShare, or with someone they sell email addresses to. I'm about to send an email to PayPal as well, in the hope that if this has happened to enough people signing up to RapidShare that they'll have their PayPal status removed. I'm definitely not going to continue using them once my month has expired.

Trying your link in Firefox brought up one of those warning pages that say it's a reported web forgery, trying same link in Konquerer brought up a 404.

I know, that was what I was fuming about. I didn't even have to visit the link to know what was up.

Actually, I want to host several large files that are too big to fit on my webspace, and I decided I'd forgo the usual free webhosts, which are a bit slow. I'm now a bit reluctant to even host the files on RapidShare. Are there any cheap, reliable hosts people can recommend instead? The files only need to be up for a week or two, so places with a one-month (or less) option would be great.

That's an interesting concept, but it probably won't be the most cost effective. I'll be hosting three 700mb files, that six people will need to download. According to their price estimator (a handy feature), it will cost $28.64 USD for the first month. In comparison, the RS cost for a month was $9 USD.

I might look into using them for a small static site though. I'm already using up about 90% of the free space I get from my ISP.

Yea, 700MB would make Nearly Free Speech too high. Somehow I knew you would be using files too big to make it worth it.

[edit] I also use Dreamhost. They're ok. I'm sure there's better hosts out there though.

Zip (or RAR) the file, breaking it into chunks. Host eachchunk in the free RapidShare.

How sensitive is the file? Do you want to push it out to a P2P network?

My personal favorite:

Zip/RAR the file, like mentioned above. Log into multiple Google Docs/Gmail accounts. Upload the chunks. When you want to download them again yourself, they're all there. Disadvantage: other people can't see the files, if you're intending to distribute them.

You can share them with the people you want to give them to. There used to be a utility that managed the upload/download process for you, I don't know if it's still around.

I can also provide temporary hosting services (for legal content) as well.

Depends. If their policy clearly states that information (email address, etc.) can be traded/sold/etc., they may just chalk it up to "another user not reading a Privacy Policy before clicking AGREE." I'm hoping that their policy states that they WON'T share it (in your favor), so PayPal will give the incident a decent looking-into.