Saturday, November 15, 2008

PayPal Scams


Have you ever received an email from "PayPal" saying you need to update your PayPal account? Here's an example(this is just the text version):

PayPal® Payment Alert : Restore Your Account‏

From: "PayPal® Security Team"

Sent: Sat 11/15/08 8:14 AM

To:

Dear valued PayPal® member:

It has come to our attention that your PayPal® account information needs to be updated as part of our continuing commitment to protect your account and to reduce the instance of fraud on our website. If you could please take 5-10 minutes out of your online experience and update your personal records you will not run into any future problems with the online service.

However, failure to update your records will result in account suspension.

Once you have updated your account records, your PayPal® session will not be interrupted and will continue as normal.

To update your PayPal® records click on the following link:

http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run

Thank You.

PayPal® UPDATE TEAM

Accounts Management As outlined in our User Agreement, PayPal® will periodically send you information about site changes and enhancements.


PayPal points out that the first thing you should notice is that PayPal will never say "Dear PayPal member" or "Dear valued PayPal member." Also if you click on the link they provide, it redirects you to a totally different URL that does not contain the word PayPal anywhere in the URL. Once you're at the site, it looks like an authentic PayPal site, but again look at the URL and more than likely it won't have anything to do with PayPal.

The North Face

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

haha, if I lived in K-tuck, I'd buy your geetar!!!

haha!
Shu

Unknown said...

Another characteristic of most of these "phishing" emails is that they threaten to suspend your account if you don't play ball (eg "update" or whatever). That's a sure sign of a scam! As soon as you see that threat, GET OUT.