Great to see you back! Paypal spoofing has to be the most effective as opposed to trying to guess which bank someone in terms of success rate. It’s good to see folks take notice and thanks for all those who stumbled, dugg and spread this post around. It brought in a big wave of StumbleUpon readers and still does now and then when someone stumbles it.

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I’ve had two fake Paypal emails, both different from the one you show above, but with telltale signs. Basically, if they are asking me to go to a URL and login, I won’t. I’ll go to the Paypal site directly.

I send such emails to spoof@paypal.com (as Jeanne suggests above). In both cases, they’ve gotten back to me quickly to confirm that they were phishing attempts.

People need to be more aware of this!

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Thanks for the article man, it’s very well written!

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Don’t mention it. I often find your posts Stumble-worthy!

Jeanne

Thanks so much for stumbling my post! I appreciate that! Don’t know whether you knew it or not, but I stumbled yours after I read it, too!

Take care!
Jeanne

A few other things you can do to recognize a fake PayPal (or other financial institution’s login page):

Right click anywhere on the page. Then click Properties. When the window opens, check to see whether the connection is encrypted. If it isn’t, it’s not PayPal (or any other secure login page).

Also, look at the status bar at the bottom of the screen. If it doesn’t contain a little yellow lock icon, the page isn’t secure, which again means it isn’t PayPal. (If the status bar has been completely removed from the webpage, that’s another clue that the website is fraudulent and the scammers don’t want the more web savvy to notice the lock icon is missing.) If the only lock icon you see is somewhere on the webpage itself, the site isn’t secure and is likely fraudulent. While PayPal has a lock icon in its login box, it also always displays one in the status bar.

If you suspect that you’ve received a phony PayPal e-mail, forward it to spoof@paypal.com.

I wrote a post a while back about this, which contains a lot more info than I’ve mentioned here. Here’s a link: Warning: Watch Out For Phishing E-Mails!

Great post, K! We can never point out these scams too often!

Cheers!
Jeanne

David, thanks. That’s very true and I just can’t help thinking ‘not everyone looks for such details before clicking a link in an email’.

You can never be too safe where your transactions are concerned.

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Madhur.. as Mark said it is probably better never to click on links in any email proposing to be from a financial institution where we may have accounts. Firefox detected it too but it failed to prompt a warning 2 times out of 5 and not sure why. But, I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference unless the url screamed out like in this one because the page was so skillfully mimicked to Paypal’s!

Kyle.. I got this one in my Gmail last week and I was a little deceived at first look before I got wary! The email got my attention just like it wanted to.. Gmail does catch a lot of spam and phising emails but this slipped through for me.