Another PayPal fraud?

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I was just checking the contents of my spam folder and came across the following mail:

Dear valued PayPal® member

It has come to our attention that your PayPal® account information needs to be
updated as part of our continuing commitment to protect your account and to
reduce the instance of fraud on our website. If you could please take 5-10 minutes
out of your online experience and update your personal records you will not run into
any future problems with the online service.

However, failure to update your records will result in account suspension.
Please update your records on or before March 06, 2005.

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

To update your PayPal® records click on the following link:
http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run

Thank You.
PayPal® UPDATE TEAM

I got this mail on the 9th. I had a look at the link and it came up with an error page on some site that had nothing to do with PayPal.

― Chriddof (Chriddof), Saturday, 12 March 2005 18:31 (twenty years ago)

Yeah, they're very common. Ignore it, but the PayPal folks always like it when I forward examples to them in that they try and do some tracing down of the follies.

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/general/SecuritySpoof-outside

https://www.paypal.com/ewf/f=pps_spf

(The second link is a form that lets you report the sites such messages redirect you to.)

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Saturday, 12 March 2005 18:35 (twenty years ago)

(I just idly checked my account and I've been on PayPal for almost five years! Has it really been that long?)

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Saturday, 12 March 2005 18:38 (twenty years ago)

Common as dishwater phishing scam. I'm now getting about 30-50 a week for Washington Mutual, Ebay, Paypal, and even non-U.S. banks I've never heard of. You can forward the e-mail including full headers to spoof@paypal.com and then delete it; nothing more you can do since this sort of thing happens way too often.

― Baked Bean Teeth (Baked Bean Teeth), Saturday, 12 March 2005 20:43 (twenty years ago)

I thought about opening an account at Washington Mututal, then thought, "No, that will make the Washington Mutual spam harder to spot."

Thus will spam bring down civilazation.

― sunburned and snowblind (kenan), Saturday, 12 March 2005 21:15 (twenty years ago)

Also -- neither PayPal nor Ebay will ever send you a message without your name in the greeting. "Dear valued PayPal® member" is a tip-off to it being spam already.

― sunburned and snowblind (kenan), Saturday, 12 March 2005 21:17 (twenty years ago)

The general rule is: if you get email from what looks like a company you're a member of and you haven't specifically requested it (ie forgotten password reminder, signup confirmation), NEVER EVER click on the links in the email...even if you wise up and realize it's taking you to a spoofed site, it could very well try to load a bunch of spyware onto your computer before you realize it's not a real site.

(Remember, just cause the link in the email SAYS it's ebay.com or paypal.com doesn't mean that it's actually taking you there. I mean, just look at this link to http://www.cbsnews.com. Usually phishers take you to a site with a plain numeric address, which is supposed to trick you into thinking it's legit, but is also a dead giveaway. Real sites rarely ever use bare IP addresses.)

― Sean Carruthers (SeanC), Sunday, 13 March 2005 00:05 (twenty years ago)

fourteen years pass...

I got a 2 cent payment from an unrecognized Russian email address. Seems real shady, but when I tried to report it Paypal just says "since you received a payment, you can't report this, take it up with the sender". I changed my password, but is there an angle I'm missing here?

― change display name (Jordan), Thursday, 9 January 2020 17:13 (five years ago)

Hmm....you don't have an email addrt that could be similar to other peoples' do you? Like JohnSmith661?

― papa stank (Neanderthal), Thursday, 9 January 2020 17:15 (five years ago)

Oh I definitely do, but the tiny testing amount seemed weird.

― change display name (Jordan), Thursday, 9 January 2020 18:04 (five years ago)

My eBay account was hacked last week. as I far as I’m aware I didn’t fall for any phishing emails or anything so I don’t know how it happened. Suddenly in the middle of the afternoon I started getting literally hundreds of spam emails, I checked my accounts and someone had bought a laptop in my name on eBay and changed my shipping address to Russia. I immediately called them and PayPal and they refunded my money later that night. What’s pretty strange is that the laptops seller is shipping the laptop to me, even though they were promptly contacted and alerted to the fraud. I plan to deny deny signing for the package, maybe it’s a box of rocks and they’ll try to get money out of me after all? I don’t get it.

― dsb, Thursday, 9 January 2020 18:20 (five years ago)

Everyone should turn on 2 step verification for everything if you haven’t already

― dsb, Thursday, 9 January 2020 18:23 (five years ago)

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