Warning: Paypal scam!

General
1

Yikes! one could easily be fooled by this. careful everyone

Uni content: you ever by a uni (or uni jersey) using paypal?

PayPal Users Hit With Another Scam
Thu Mar 6, 3:00 PM ET

Paul Roberts, IDG News Service

Another Internet scam that targets online shoppers who use the EBay PayPal payment service is circulating, according to reports from those who have
received the suspicious e-mail and to messages posted to online discussion groups.

PayPal did not respond to requests for comment.

The e-mail appears to come from “info@paypal.com” and has a subject line that reads “Your PayPal account is Limited.” The body of the message reads,
in part: “PayPal is currently performing regular maintenance of our security measures. Your account has been randomly selected for this maintenance,
and placed on Limited Access status.”

Professional Appearance

Recipients are asked to provide their PayPal account information, credit card number, and bank account number using a form in the body of the e-mail
message. A button is provided to “log in” to PayPal’s site and update the information.

The message is designed to look like it was generated by PayPal, using graphics from the PayPal Web site as well as fonts and colors similar to
legitimate PayPal correspondence. A boilerplate statement about receiving notifications is even supplied at the end of the message, with links to
PayPal that allow the recipient to modify their notification preferences.

“It was formatted really nicely. It had the right colors for the PayPal site and there weren’t any obvious grammar mistakes,” said Karawynn Long, a
writer and Web designer in Seattle who received one of the apparent scam e-mail messages. Long was almost fooled by the message into entering her
account information.

“The subject of the e-mail was odd. But it was early in the morning. Pre-coffee,” Long said.

Searching for the Source

Suspicious of being asked for her confidential account information, however, Long used her e-mail program to view the message’s HTML source code. Her
search revealed that information submitted using the form would go to a host server with a domain name ending in.ru, the domain suffix for Russia,
according to Long.

“When I viewed the source I could see [the scam], but how many people view the source on their e-mail?” Long said.

Scams targeting PayPal are common, according to Matt Sergeant, senior antispam technologist at MessageLabs in Gloucester, England

2

I got a similar message last week from someone posing as eBay, asking me to fill my account information into a form in a rich email. It also used eBay graphics and looked very eBay-like. However I did spot at least one spelling or grammar mistake, confirming what I already knew.

Legitemate businesses should never-ever have to ask you, cold, for your account number or other personal information. If you’re in the middle of a transaction, that’s another story. If they want to know your account number, it should already be in their system. If something goes wrong with their system, they should create a new account for you. This is what credit card companies do, for example if your card was stolen. Same account gets a new number, but they send that number to you, not vice-versa.

I went to eBay and logged in. Nothing seemed out of place. If eBay needs something from me, they will contact me and have me go to them first, not enter personal information into a form in an email.

If any of you sends your bank account number in reply to an email, from anybody, I will pity you and hope you learn a lesson.

Keep your eyes open…

3

Which is a good reason to have a mail client with the option to not display rich emails. If everything gets displayed as text you don’t have this problem… or the problem of mail loading images from a remote server and possibly identifying your email address… or the problem of viruses launching themselves in an iframe.

It is the way forward…

Phil

4

Geez…I’d rather give out all my banking info everyday than use a sh!tty browser like Mozilla!

I still can’t get over the attitude of ‘Lots of people don’t like Bill Gates, so I don’t like Bill Gates, so I will use sub-par software’

5

I actually started using it because it does bayesian spam filtering on email, which OE or Outlook doesn’t. I was pleasantly surprised by the rest of it, too… it does everything IE does plus a nifty things that you don’t know how you ever lived without… popup window stopping, mouse gestures, the works…

Phil

6

Now, now boys, if you want to get into a flame war over browers, go to slashdot. Otherwise Sofa, you should realise Mozilla/Phoenix is superior to IE, if for nothing else but the tabbed browsing :D.

Later,
Eli.

P.S. Sorry for the personal note at the end, I couldn’t help myself.

7

yes it happens with many guy’s even i have received such email about concerning bay product payment which i didn’t buy , so when ever you receive such email don’t click and login to paypal by their given links for more good information you can visit this site aboutpaypal.org .

8

Yeah, got an email from eBay that I bought 3 cell phones, and gave a link of where to go to dispute the charges. The site was asking me to log in, of course.

Using some tricks of the trade, I identified the site as a web page on a K-12 school in Atlanta, GA. I guess the kids were trying to get account info to sell. Too bad for them other info on the site listed their names, homework, etc!

Quick phone call to the school and the site was down in 10 minutes. Not sure what happened to the kids. I’m tempted to call them at home (that info was also there) and ask.

9

Too bad Paypal e-mails come from @intl.paypal.com

I had one day charges on my Paypal account when I logged in to check something, I lost $70… I had never authorized these charges, but they were very real. Paypal was of no help except to reverse the charges… of which it was too late because it went through my bank. I lost $70 from Insufficient Funds charges. My bank refunded $35 out of the three $35 charges I had on my account.

I had three charges over $400 to “OffShorePC”, which I had never heard of.

I am now against using Paypal.

10

Do you know how your account info got compromised? Ever log on to Paypal from an email or anything similar? Probably not, but somehow somebody got your account info.

For everyone else, between 2003 and 2007 hopefully you have learned to never click links in any email to go to an account of yours. Ever. One way to spot this is if you can see what the link is in your status bar or similar without clicking on it. If it starts with an IP address instead of company name, easy spotting of bogusness. But sometimes they look a lot like the real thing, with names like “paypal.info.com.” The thing to be aware of is that the site you’re connecting to there is info.com, not paypal.com. It’s always the last thing before the .com, .org, etc.

Sorry about your theft, Borgschulze, that sucks. For anyone who thinks their account info may be compromised, time to close that account as soon as possible and then set up a new one separately. Or switch companies, but it’s not usually the company’s fault.

11

No, I am very secure with my information.

I never log into anything from an E-Mail unless it’s a registration link from a forum. I know a phishing E-Mail when I see one.

When this happened I hadn’t logged into Paypal for over two weeks.

Either way, it pisses me off just thinking about it, I want to go brutally murder the ignorant pieces of shit at Paypal that won’t give me back my money they lost.

12

Both Paypal and eBay always address you with your real name in official emails from them, which they say is one of the baseline ways of determining if the email is a scam or not. Like John said, if there’s any doubt, I just look at where the link actually takes you. In my email client, that shows up in a message bar at the bottom of my window.

For a while, I tried to annoy the phishers by entering crap information into their linked forms (firstname: Doyouthinkimabigenoughdumbass Lastname: Tofallforyourstupidploy), hoping that they’d waste some of their time trying to use my fake info. But who knows if it did any good.

Oh, and Firefox is the best browser available, imho.