WARNING: Paypal Fishing in Germany (and elsewhere?)

[Giraffe]

I don't know if this is happening in other countries too at the moment, in Germany there is quite some fishing (paypal and banks).

Regarding paypal... People receive an email with an invoice for something they have not ordered and a fake delivery address. There is a link to cancel the alleged payment.

Next day or so, second email, something along the lines, "We noted that someone tried to access your account. For security reasons we have blocked your account. Click here to authetificate, so you can use the account again."

Don't click those links. The mails are not from paypal.

 

[charlie]

"Phishing" unfortunately catches a lot of people.

Phishing is the attempt to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details (and sometimes, indirectly, money), often for malicious reasons, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.[1][2] The word is a neologism created as a homophone of fishing due to the similarity of using fake bait in an attempt to catch a victim. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites, auction sites, banks, online payment processors or IT administrators are commonly used to lure unsuspecting victims. Phishing emails may contain links to websites that are infected with malware.[3] Phishing is typically carried out by email spoofing[4] or instant messaging,[5] and it often directs users to enter details at a fake website whose look and feel are almost identical to the legitimate one. Phishing is an example of social engineering techniques used to deceive users, and exploits the poor usability of current web security technologies.[6] Attempts to deal with the growing number of reported phishing incidents include legislation, user training, public awareness, and technical security measures. Many websites have now created secondary tools for applications, like maps for games, but they should be clearly marked as to who wrote them, and users should not use the same passwords anywhere on the internet.

More at link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing

 

[mt_dreams]

Back in the early days of email I used to modify the outgoing email address to mess around with all the love triangles going on during my highschool days, ahh the good ol days. I'm pretty sure these days you can't modify the senders email address, so all you have to do to confirm if the email is real is look at the actual senders email address. In canada, paypals news feed is @e.paypal.ca, and their account direct adresss is @intl.paypal. Just confirm the email has been sent by that address (and not just the name used by the address), and you'll be good to go. An example of a phishing email uses the name "[email protected]" but it's real address is "[email protected]". Also if they don't use your full name in the email, and instead use something like "dear customer", it's probably fake.