Little Paypal Email Warning

[Guest]

[Sharon]

I have heard there is an Email going around that claims to be from Paypal.

The general gist is that someone from another country has tried to access your account and unless you reply to the email within 72 hours your account will be suspended.

When you go to your Paypal account there is no message waiting for you.  Additionally you cannot copy and paste the Email, so you cannot send a copy to Paypal.

I know this sounds weird as I cannot see how someone could benefit from you just replying to an Email.  But I would be careful and not reply from this but go into your Paypal account and use the contact us bit.

End of public announcement 

[kbmum]

By replying to the email, you're letting the sender know that your email address/account is active.  Then it can be passed on to spammers.

I'll bet that when a person replies to the email, he/she will get another email asking for account specifics, like passwords, credit card numbers, and bank accounts.

[Sharon]

The devious little rotters    That's the trouble, people like me can't see any harm in replying to an Email but these criminals can do all sorts of nasties   

Thanks Kbmum 

[kbmum]

There's a section on eBay devoted to protecting yourself from spoofs.  It's here:

http://pages.ebay.com/education/spooftutorial/

It's a sensitive issue for me, because I got duped by one of those emails a couple of years ago.  Fortunately, eBay fixed it without any damage to my eBay or PayPal accounts.

[grecopa]

I seem to get at least one of those types of things every week.  Paypal will always address you by the name on your account.  Not just "Paypal member".  Also, if you put the curser on the link, many times it will pop up something different.  Not always, though so beware.

[Anna]

This is a little bit off topic, but I just experienced somthing similar but not about PayPal.  I was having problems with my ebay account.  I had problems changing my password there, so kbmum sent me the link for a live chat seesion with one of ebay's reps.  To make a long story short, it turned out that my ebay account is secure, but my account was being used to generate ebay SPAM from Italy.  Ebay is working on cleaning up that mess right now.