Worrying Paypal...


pubjoe

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This email I've just sent to them explains my worries:
Me to paypal said:
I received an email from 'service@paypal.com' saying you "suspect that your PayPal account may have been accessed by an unauthorized third party.".

The email seems legitimate, there's a link to www.paypal.com/us/... to confirm my personal and bank information. Maybe I'm being too careful, but this does not fully comply with this extract from your own security advice: "make sure the adress at the top of the browser window you're brought to reads exactly www.paypal.com/uk" (check your spelling of *address* by the way!!!).

Being a US based form, I cannot fill in my personal OR bank information correctly. I am also asked for my bank PIN number, which I am VERY concerned about. I have never given my PIN number to paypal or ANY other online company (including my bank) and I don't really understand why you would want it???

As you can guess, the whole situation is worrying me, I am new to paypal and understood that this was going to be a safe way to make and recieve online payments.
The piss take is, like ebay, there's no chance of a human actually responding. So what do I do. I can't access my money as my account has been temporaraly restiricted and I don't want to fill out that form. :angry:
 
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Try signing into PayPal. If you truly can't access it, then the email is real. If you can sign in and access it, then it's a scammer trying to get your password. I had a scammer send me a similar email but for ebay, he was tryin to get my ebay password
 
Yeah, I can sign in. The link from the ebay brought me to a sign-in page, which then directly asked for the bank information.

As I said above, the email seems very legit, Iand it links to www.paypal.com/us. I mean, how can anyone fake that???

....Just thought of something, and this is VERY interesting: Maybe they are using javascript to FAKE the http address.... I clicked on it and tried to change it and look at this!!!
paypalskank1.gif

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paypalskank3.gif


...Fucking hell! This is well dodgy, I was halfway through filling out the form as well! It looks like a VERY clever scam. I'm just glad I'm so suspicious!!!
 

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PinkSpider posted on Sep 5 2004 at 10:08 PM said:
I refuse to use paypal... never have never will. If im gonna pay for something I wanna pay via my visa electron.

Yeah I agree, but your just as likely to have a scam attempt.

[edit] IN fact I think as long as your REALLY careful (as all this proves) then paypal (like ebay) is a good system. You've just gotta be very wary of scammers like this.

Again, this is a very clever scam, faking the http. I wonder how many people have been had by this?
 
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Yeah, if you can sign in, then you dont have a problem. Someone tried doing this to me via ebay, I filled in my screen name and password, then I realized that the URL wasn't even at www.ebay.com. I then quickly changed my password at ebay, and I submitted the email to the Ebay Spoof Email Team(whatever it is). Anyway after I submitted the email to the spoof email thing at ebay, they told me it was a scam and they were already trying to track down the scammer. I had to also change my paypal pass, because I used the same one for pp and ebay.

Haha, it's actually easier for hackers to get a hold of you credit card info than it is for them to get into your pp acc.
 
Check the mail headers to see if they originate from paypal... chances are they do not.

EDIT: You beat me by a minute and actually did it ;)
 
how can you sleep anyway when you use a totaly insecure and buggy browser to manage your money? and it seems like you also use outlook, thats totaly crazy...
get some alternatives and ban ie/outlook from the internet forever
 
Vimacs posted on Sep 5 2004 at 11:04 PM said:
how can you sleep anyway when you use a totaly insecure and buggy browser to manage your money? and it seems like you also use outlook, thats totaly crazy...
get some alternatives and ban ie/outlook from the internet forever

...Here we go! :rolleyes:

Actually you are right, I'm just lazy and put-off by change. I know this has been debated many times, but what would you suggest for both browser and email. This computer is being used by a few people (my family) with seperate accounts, so I want to keep it quite user-friendly.
 
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I jsut type www.paypal.co.uk and I should automatically bring you to the https://www.paypal.com/uk/ site. Also Make 100% Sure it Says "https" and make 100% Sure that the little Security Lock appears at the bottom of the browser :D

Edit -

PayPal Never ask for your account details / Card numbers etc etc in Emails.
 
Yeah, good advice. I thought it was legit until the web link asked for my PIN number.

Here's why this scam is so worryingly clever (when using outlook & IE anyway):
- The 'from' adderss in outlook says service@paypal.com (okay, easy to fake that one)
- The email addressed my name & email correctly.
- The email was worded well and looked as it should.
- The link in the email appears to link to https//:www.paypal.com/....
- In IE's browser address bar, they have FAKED the 'https//:www.paypal.com bit so it looks like your ARE on paypal's site. (my windowsXP security is up to date btw)
- The browser status bar is hidden so you may forget about the security icon.

I think that they've got most things well covered with this one, okay, there are a couple of small clues, but even if you followed paypals fraud advise to a T, you could easily miss them.

[edit]Basicall, the best advise imo, is 'don't trust ANY email'.
 
A couple of things...
1. What the hell? I didn't think address bar faking was possible under IE... then again I recall the null byte exploit. I think what happens is the link shows up fine in your address bar but screws up when shown in the status bar... which is why it's hidden.

2. Don't rely on the security lock unless you actually click that certificate. Anyone can get a certificate for about £70/year. Which would be made back up by the scammers in a day or so.
 
Vimacs posted on Sep 5 2004 at 05:04 PM said:
and it seems like you also use outlook, thats totaly crazy...
get some alternatives and ban ie/outlook from the internet forever

I agree, Internet Explorer and Outlook are the worst things ever. One day I had my firewall down for about an hour, and I got a trojan. Then that trojan installed tons of spyware and adware shit. I ran tons of spyware and adware programs. But still when I load up Internet Explorer I get about 20 popups from the spyware program. So in a few words "Internet Explorer isn't secure at all".

I started using Mozilla FireFox, and personnaly that is the best browser i've used
 
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