First, they let you pay over the Web using your email address. Now PayPal is about to give its users the ability to send and receive payments through their mobile phones.

The new service, called PayPal Mobile, lets you do just about anything you could do with your traditional email based PayPal service, but via mobile phones.

While seemingly a novel idea, doing financial transactions through mobile phones isn’t exactly new. In certain European and Asian countries that use more advanced mobile technologies, m-commerce has been the norm for quite some time now, with telcos having various offerings that let subscribers pay for, and receive, funds through SMS. PayPal’s new service, though, is said to appeal to a larger number of users, given its 100 million-strong userbase.

This makes me wonder, though, whether phishers would find scamming easier, since transactions can now be done over the phone. Still, the fact that you’d still need to have an existing PayPal account before you can activate your mobile for use does add to security.

[via ZDNet]