There at it again with a twist. Supposively paypal sent me a payment confirmation of a Sony DSC-P150 Digital Camera. The shipping address is to a Micheal Murphy in California. E-mail has a place where you click to dispute the purchase. Of course I didn't bite. The interesting thing about this is I went to the paypal site and copied the the spoof address and pasted it the forwarding e-mail. The address pasted as sentence begining with f word and not with spoof@paypal.com. Haven't seen that before. Also a alert window popped up with some wierd obscene message. Has anyone else been getting this scam? What will they come up with next.
btw: Run a spyware and virus check now, just to be safe.
-PB
Posted by Jim Erhardt on August 16, 2006 at 7:12 AM
Without exaggeration, we must get a half-dozen of these every day. "You've added a new email address to your PayPal account" or "You've sent payment to" someone you never heard of. I delete these immediately - they are scammers looking for your log in info. Simple way to check is to open a new browser, log in to your PayPal account normally and check it directly. Never use the link included in the email to log in to your PayPal account!
I guess there will be no ridding ourselves of these nuisance emails.
Thanks for the heads up. I had not heard of these. My son uses PayPal so I'll alert him too.
Posted by Walter Rowe on August 16, 2006 at 11:35 AM
I use Mozilla Thunderbird to read e-mail. In Thunderbird, you can move your mouse over the link and the URL is displayed in the status bar at the bottom. That is always a dead giveaway. It never points to PayPal. You can also view the source code of the message and look for the href= references. In all cases, you will find they do not point to PayPal. If you read the PayPal agreement, they are very good at stating they never send these kinds of e-mails.
As others have noted, these messages are Phishing messages. They are looking to get your PayPal login ID and password. You might even get one of these and not even have a PayPal account.
Posted by Frank Winters on August 16, 2006 at 12:12 PM
I forward these to spoof@paypal.com. They get right back to me confirming that it is fraud. Hopefully they then follow up with a posse to get after the varmints!
Posted by John W. Wall on August 17, 2006 at 2:43 PM
Just yesterday I learned that someone had hacked my ebay account and sold a vehicle through my name. The poor buyer had tried to contact me but I thought he was some rotten phisher and deleted the messages, never bothering to check my ebay account since I use it only sporadically. Turns out I fell part-way for a phishing email a while back and had forgotten all about it. I'd given out my password but balked when asked for account number info. Unfortunately, I felt so good about not falling for the account number question that I forgot I'd already fallen for the password scam. That happened a few months ago, but the hacker didn't use the info until just last month, and I didn't find out about it till yesterday. Luckily I don't use the same password for paypal or other places, and luckily too, ebay cleared things up and refunded my loss. I thought I was too smart to fall for that stuff, and I've caught many, many spoofs, but I had my guard down just long enough....
Discussion
6 repliesJohn
Thanks for the heads-up, John.
btw: Run a spyware and virus check now, just to be safe.
-PB
I guess there will be no ridding ourselves of these nuisance emails.
As others have noted, these messages are Phishing messages. They are looking to get your PayPal login ID and password. You might even get one of these and not even have a PayPal account.