Google fired the opening shots in the mobile wallet wars yesterday, with the launch of Google Wallet. But PayPal has been quick to shoot back with a salvo of its own.

Ebay and its payments subsidiary PayPal have taken to the courts seeking to put a hold on the NFC-based mobile wallet.

Ebay and PayPal are suing Google, Stephanie Tilenius, Osama Bedier and 50 yet-to-be identified others over concerns that PayPal secrets have been used and disclosed during the development of the search giant’s mobile payments strategy.

“We treat PayPal’s ‘secrets’ seriously,” says the firm’s Amanda Pires, “and take it personally when someone else doesn’t. So we made a decision today. We filed a lawsuit against Google and two former colleagues who now work there, Osama Bedier and Stephanie Tilenius.”

Tilenius and Bedier are former senior executives at Ebay and PayPal who moved over to Google to work on the Google Wallet project, which was announced yesterday. Bedier is Google’s vice president of payments. He reports to Tilenius, the firm’s VP of commerce and payments.

The online payments firm charges that Google hired away Osama Bedier at a time when he was in negotiation with the search giant on PayPal’s behalf, putting together a deal which would see Paypal providing payment functionality within Android. This will have given rise to a conflict of interest, says PayPal, that it was not told about.

Further, Paypal alleges that “Bedier knows PayPal’s trade secrets and is misappropriating them at Google.” At PayPal, Bedier had access to sensitive information, including the firm’s assessment of Google’s abilities and weaknesses in mobile payments, the company says.

“By hiring Bedier, with his trade secret knowledge of PayPal’s plans and understanding of Google’s weaknesses as viewed by the industry leader, Google bought the most comprehensive and sophisticated critique of its own problems available.”

You can read the entire lawsuit (PDF) here.

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