Prometheus
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Mar 8, 2008
- Messages
- 9,472
For anyone who uses PayPal (sadly a necessary evil, in a lot of cases), or who has friends or relatives who do, I just wanted to post a heads-up.
I received a pretty blatant phishing e-mail earlier, from the blatantly fake address of "service@paypall.com", and with a bullshit reason for wanting information from me. This in itself is unremarkable - it's typical phishing scam stuff. However, that's not why I'm writing this warning. It was quite well-written, but some such e-mails can be, so this in itself wasn't of particular note.
The alarming part is that the e-mail was the fact that it contained my full name (just as genuine PayPal messages do), AND the unique way in which I write my e-mail address specifically for use with PayPal and other sites where I would want to know if information has been compromised.
Of course, the fact that these are being used for a phishing e-mail to try to get into the account and get at the monetary details proves that these are the only bits of info that have been compromised (I know my credit card account to be fine), which is good to know, but the fact remains that this is easily the most convincing phishing message I've ever seen, hence the heads-up here.
If you use PayPal, keep your eyes open. If you know anyone else who does, please make sure that they know, too - ESPECIALLY if they're not aware of scams like this.
I received a pretty blatant phishing e-mail earlier, from the blatantly fake address of "service@paypall.com", and with a bullshit reason for wanting information from me. This in itself is unremarkable - it's typical phishing scam stuff. However, that's not why I'm writing this warning. It was quite well-written, but some such e-mails can be, so this in itself wasn't of particular note.
The alarming part is that the e-mail was the fact that it contained my full name (just as genuine PayPal messages do), AND the unique way in which I write my e-mail address specifically for use with PayPal and other sites where I would want to know if information has been compromised.
Of course, the fact that these are being used for a phishing e-mail to try to get into the account and get at the monetary details proves that these are the only bits of info that have been compromised (I know my credit card account to be fine), which is good to know, but the fact remains that this is easily the most convincing phishing message I've ever seen, hence the heads-up here.
If you use PayPal, keep your eyes open. If you know anyone else who does, please make sure that they know, too - ESPECIALLY if they're not aware of scams like this.
Last edited by a moderator: