Another New PayPal Phishing Scheme
This email was received by our HankeringForYarn blogger. She forwarded it to me as another good example of how inventive phishers are becoming.
This email looked totally legitimate and was something that she might have checked on because of the domain name used in the PayPal address.
PayPal
Dear member,
This email confirms that you have paid paypal@creative.com $379.12 USD using PayPal.
This credit card transaction will appear on your bill as “PAYPAL *CREATIVE”.
——————————————————————————–
Payment Details
Purchased From:creative.labs
Item # Item Title Quantity Price Subtotal
8751475190 Creative Labs Gigaworks THX 7.1 S750 PC Speakers 1 $349.99 USD $349.99 USDShipping & Handling via USPS First Class Mail to 154XX
(includes any seller handling fees) $18.25 USD
Shipping Insurance (optional): —
Sales Tax (6.000% inPA) : $10.88 USDTotal: $379.12 USD
Note:Thank you!——————————————————————————–
Shipping Information
Shipping Info: ***** * *****
*** ***** ***
Brownsville, PA 15417
United StatesAddress Status: Confirmed
——————————————————————————–
If you have questions about the shipping and tracking of your purchased item or service, please contact the seller paypal@creative.com.
——————————————————————————–
Do you confirm this transaction?
If this transaction was not made by you please immediately take the following steps:
Login to your account by clicking on the link below
Provide requested information to ensure you are the owner of the account
Find this transaction in HISTORY and click ‘Cancel Transaction’CANCEL TRANSACTION!
Thank you for using PayPal!
The PayPal TeamPlease do not reply to this email. This mailbox is not monitored and you will not receive a response. For assistance, log in to your PayPal account and choose the Help link located in the top right corner of any PayPal page.
PayPal Email ID PP843
Fortunately, her email client opens all email as plain text. That enabled her to see actual link for the “CANCELL TRANSACTION” text. It linked to a non-PayPal address, of course.
The official look of this email is another example of the lengths phishers will go to in order to ger your personal information.
Identity theft is rapidly on the rise worldwide and human error, such as believing and responding to this type of email, is the largest reason.
We all need to take steps to protect ourselves. I suggest the following:
- Never respond to this type of email. If you have any questions go to the PayPal (or eBay or whatever) site and login normally. You will then be able to verify the transaction or message safely.
- Set your email client to open all email as plain text. Most have this option and it will allow you to both see the links and it will also disable the tracking features in many images thereby cutting down on spam that you receive. You can then choose if you want to view it as HTML.
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POSTED IN: Scams, Secure That Computer, Security
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