San Francisco- Federal officials have ordered PayPal, the popular online payment service, to turn over customer records as part of an investigation into tax cheats who hide money overseas.

The demand, approved by a federal judge in San Jose, requires PayPal to provide details about U.S. users who sent money to a bank or credit card account in more than 30 foreign countries. The request covers the years 1999 to the present.

Amanda Pires, a spokeswoman for PayPal, a division of San Jose Internet giant eBay, said Tuesday that her company had just received the summons and is evaluating its options.

“The privacy of our customers’ information is something that we take very seriously,” she said.

The Internal Revenue Service’s interest in PayPal customers is part of a broad, yearlong initiative to crack down on tax dodgers who hide money outside the United States. The problem costs the U.S. government millions of dollars annually in tax revenue.

Users of PayPal transmitted nearly $27.5 billion in 2005. The service has nearly 100 million customer accounts, making it the Internet’s leading payment service.

Federal authorities hope to identify PayPal users who sent money to banks or credit card accounts in any of the more than 30 nations, many of them known as tax havens. Belize, the Cayman Islands, Latvia, Panama and Switzerland were among them.

However, PayPal is unavailable in most of the countries cited, Pires said.

Authorities also hopes the records will help identify customers whose credit card numbers were obtained in previous summons that were issued to Visa, MasterCard and American Express. Nowhere in the court records was there any mention about how many individuals the government has already received information about or estimates of what PayPal will provide.

Word of the federal government’s interest in PayPal’s records emerged Tuesday in public comments by Eileen O’Connor, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Tax Division. Her department handled the legal aspects of getting the summons.

“PayPal is another one of the mechanisms by which money stashed overseas might be spent,” she told reporters, the Associated Press reported.

U.S. District Judge James Ware in San Jose approved the so-called John Doe summons in February. Court documents show that PayPal is ordered to turn over a wealth of information about the customers in question, including records about account activity and balances, plus details about any eBay accounts they have.

Pires said PayPal’s security makes it difficult for customers to hide money overseas. Payments are capped at $10,000 or $2,000 per transaction, she said, and any unusual activity is flagged by the company for closer inspection.

“It’s not really a system that’s easy to hide funds with,” she said.

EBay stock was relatively unaffected by the news, gaining 23 cents to close at $38.32 in Nasdaq Stock Market trading.