The One with the Thoughts of Frans

Fake Paypal e-mails

I’m not sure if it’s possible that some kind of thing figured out that I have a Paypal account and what e-mail address I use to access it, but on my Hotmail account, the only spam I receive are fake mails which try to make you believe they’re from Paypal.

Today one managed to get through Hotmails junkmail filter (until now all mails doing like they’re from Paypal landed in junk). I suppose that by marking it junk I have helped quite a number of other Hotmail users.

The content was as follows:

From : PayPal Inc. <SERVICE@PAYPAL.C0M>
Sent : Friday, January 6, 2006 6:31 PM
To : …@hotmail.com
Subject : Unauthorized Access: (Routing Code: Q521-K001-Q-P090)

You have added buy517car7@aol.com as a new email address for your PayPal account.
If you did not authorize this change or if you need assistance with your account, please contact PayPal customer service at:

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run

Thank you for using PayPal!The PayPal Team

Please do not reply to this e-mail. Mail sent to this address cannot beanswered. For assistance, log in to your PayPal account and choose the”Help” link in the header of any page.
—————————————————————- PROTECT YOUR PASSWORD
NEVER give your password to anyone and ONLY log in athttps://www.paypal.com/.Protect yourself against fraudulent websites by opening a new web browser (e.g. Internet Explorer or Netscape) and typingin the PayPal URL every time you log in to your account.
—————————————————————-

PayPal Email ID PP00510

It’s sort of funny, a scam acting like you’ve already been the victim of a scam.

Each of the links actually lead to http://ool-4350c367.dyn.optonline.net:82/webscr/index.php, which, as you can see, looks exactly like the homepage of Paypal.

And I received the same scam again, only now it has a different code attached.

4 Comments

  1. I don’t think it has worked it out but rather random. I get fake PayPal e-mail as well including such things as someone has logged in to your account from a different computer sort of thing as well as the one above. I receive these on my gmail account (where it is associated with PayPal) and also my BT Internet e-mail address which is not associated with PayPal.

    I think the presumption is that chances are the person is going to be associated with PayPal and ebay.

    January 6, 2006 @ 20:16Permalink
    Tom

  2. I’ve trained Mail (Apple’s mail application) to recognize fake PayPal emails from real ones, and it does a hell of a good job. Opera’s M2 never seemed to get the hang of it, so I was still looking through to double check before they were deleted.

    I simply file them into a Spam folder now, and I run an Automator tasks to delete them in one click. I’m working on setting it up to delete automatically. The ones labeled Junk will delete, but some pass as not Junk.

    Ah, learing software. 😀

    January 6, 2006 @ 23:14Permalink
    Ethan Poole

  3. I always check the titles and senders of the junkmail quickly before deleting it. It’s usually allright, but if one of them looks realistic I’m sometimes curious to see what it’s like, or sometimes something which isn’t junk ends up in there because someone forgot to specify a subject or something.

    January 6, 2006 @ 23:36Permalink
    Frans

  4. You can usually tell when it is a fake e-mail just by what they are proposing has happened to your PayPal account.

    January 7, 2006 @ 2:10Permalink
    Tom

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