Pay Pal Scam?

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Bad Dawg
Posts: 388
Joined: Fri Jul 18, 2003 3:27 pm
Location: Solomon Islands

Pay Pal Scam?

Post by Bad Dawg »

I just got this email that smells like three day old fish, to me. Since a lot of us use Paypal, I thought some of the RCCA members might see it too. I'm not even going to click on the links in the email till I get back word from Earthlink and PayPal that it isn't a fraud



Dear valued PayPal® member,

Due to recent fraudulent transactions, we have issued the following security requirements.

It has come to our attion that 95% of all fraudulent transactions are caused by members using stolen credit cards to purchase or sell non existant items. Thus we require our members to add a Debit/Check card to their billing records as part of our continuing commitment to protect your account and to reduce the instance of fraud on our website. Your Debit/Check card will only be used to identify you. If you could please take 5-10 minutes out of your online experience and renew your records you will not run into any future problems with the PayPal® service. However, failure to confirm your records will result in your account suspension.

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

To update your billing records please login to your account by clicking here.

Thank you for your time,
PayPal® Billing Department.


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Which_way_is_up
Posts: 1637
Joined: Tue Feb 12, 2002 8:54 am
Location: Dallas, Texas

Post by Which_way_is_up »

Mark, you're absolutely right what you have is an example of a "phishing" (pronounced "fishing") email. It is an attempt to get you to go to a disguised bogus web site that looks like PayPal to get you to sign in so that they can capture your PayPal sign in information and go after your PayPal account. It's not a big deal as long as you realize that any and all such emails you receive are bogus. Over the last year I've received dozens of these from PayPal and several supposed Banks that I don't even have accounts with. They're broadcast by the thousands like any other spam email. Only these are attempting to sucker you into giving up important information. PayPal has a fraud dept. that you can forward that email to if you like.

The simple way to know that they are bogus is that they will not address the email to you by name but by a generic term like "PayPal Member". PayPal has a page that discusses these "spoof" emails as they call them. You can go to this link and read more https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?c ... of-outside .

The key is to assume that any such email from any institution, PayPal, Bank, etc is bogus and just erase it. <b>Absolutely never click on their link and provide them with any information.</b>
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