RLiegh's Journal: How do they know I use Paypal?

Like most people, I have several email accounts that I keep track of, and I've noticed a disturbing trend. I have used the paypal service to do online billing and to make purchases over the internet for a variety of goods and services (nothing exotic; we're talking online games, web hosting, real's superpass service.). So far, nothing unusual there.

What's truly bizarre, in my mind, is that over the course of the last year I have consistently been targetted for phishing emails in the email account that I use with paypal. On a slow month I'll get four letters to that account, on approximate average, however, I get no less than 10 emails a week (all of which I forward to [e-mail]).

In my other email accounts, including one that I have used in articles I've had published? Na-da. Zip.

That's right, I get none. Not a single attempt.

On my other email accounts I regularly get spam, particularly the drive-by type spam where they're going down a list alphabetically of email addresses, and sometimes I just get random spam.

I have never once gotten a phishing email in any of my other email addresses. This leads me to one conclusion; somehow the phishers have access to a widely-available (the fact my mailbox is hit so frequently makes me suspect that) list of paypal users and their email addresses.

Where would they get that list?
Who would give out the email addresses of their paypal using clients?

I'm throwing this out there to the slashdot audience to see wether or not I'm alone in getting deluged by phishers on a regular basis and also to see what insights Slashdotters would have on why this is happening only (or at least predominantly) to people who use Paypal.

If this is happening as widespreadly as I suspect, isn't it time we geeks started asking some questions and figure why this is happening?