Who pays for a PayPal account? They are free. I am an IT major. I don't think you understand how account data is stored. Employees at PayPal can't just access banking info to steal it. That's not how it works. It would be insane for them to operate like that. If that's what your instructor told you, he was full of ****. Of course PayPal is hackable. But so are banks. It sounds like you still trust them with your money, though.

The situation you describe is not the problem of PayPal,, or any other vendor. It would be like if you gave someone your debit card and PIN number and asked them as a favor to go to the ATM to get $20 out, but they took some money out for themselves, too. That's not the bank's fault that you were naive and gave someone access to your bank account. In the situation you describe, you and these other people decided, for some reason, to give a stranger online access to your bank account via PayPal. How does that show that PayPal is bad? You were the victim of a social engineering scam, but that's an opportunity to learn about not giving your account information (and banking information for crying out loud) away to strangers online. There's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater and live in the stone age, though.