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Scam Involving PayPal

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Parent Category: News

Category: Email Scams

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Written by MrCompTech

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Today I received an e-mail in my inbox, I immediately recognized it as a scam, having seen so many and almost fallen for one that looked like it came from my bank. I wondered how many people there are that might not recognize this scam. The e-mail looks like it comes from PayPal.  First and and of foremost importantance, DO NOT fill out and submit this form. The information will not go to PayPal it will go to the scammers. And as soon as they recieve your information they will quickly drain your PayPal account of all funds! If you want to know if there is a problem with your PayPal account go to PayPal.com and log in and check for messages from PayPal.

The e-mail comes along with an attachment and instructions for you to download/save the attachment to your PC. The name of the attachment is:

"PayPal.com_Account_Confirmation_Form.pdf.zip"

Notice that the end of the file name has a 'double extension' of ".pdf.zip". On Windows operating systems the display of file extensions is turned off by default. So when you look at this file name on your Windows PC, after downloading it, it will look like :

"PayPal.com_Account_Confirmation_Form.pdf"

This gets you to think that the form is a harmless "PDF" file. It's just a device to hide what could be devastating financial damage.

At first look at the e-mail, you see the famous PayPal logo, this is to inspire false trust & confidence, and to the right of the logo is a date/time stamp along with an official looking receipt number, again this is to falsely inspire trust from you. This header looks professional as does the reset of the e-mail including the attachement.

This is only an image/picture of the e-mail and not the actual e-mail.

To view a larger image of it in a separate window just click on the image.

If you look carefully at the "From:" address you will see an indication that this is a scam:

The thing to notice here is the domain the e-mail is from is "paypali.com" instead of "paypal.com" notice the letter "i" after "paypal". The letter "i" was chosen as part of the domain name because it is easy to overlook when scanning through your e-mails. Another item in this email is the subject line. It's intended to get you to take action quickly without thinking about what the results of that action might be.

"Your account has been temporarily limited !"

In the body of the e-mail it tells you that by submitting the information requested in the attached document the "limitations" on your PayPal account will be removed and that your account will be "restored". The implication here is that you will not need to do anything else, like going to the real PayPal web site. Scammers do their best to use peoples habits to their own financial gains. The scammers also know your in a hurray so you will probably only skim through the e-mail and if they can convince you that something is wrong with your PayPal account, you will take the action that takes the least amount of time from your already busy day.

If you receive the e-mail, please don't download/save the form to your PC and certainly don't open the attachment. I have done so here so that you could see what information it is asking for to emphasize the financial damage that you could suffer by submitting this information. Not only would your PayPal account be drained but the form also asks for credit card information.

This is only an image/picture of the form and not the actual form.

To view a larger image of it in a separate window just click on the image.

Although I have not taken the time to prove it I believe it even gets worse. When you click the "Submit Profile" button the form will tell you that you've entered something wrong. Most likely to make you think that you have entered the wrong credit card information or PayPal account information when you signed up for PayPal. This to get you to enter different PayPal or credit/debit card information. Every time you click the "Submit Profile" button the new information will be sent to the scammers.

How not to be scammed:

Financial institutions and organizations may send out notices if there are problems with your account. But you will NOT be asked to fill in a form that you download and submit. They may ask you to visit their web site and log in to your account so that you can view any messages and take appropriate action. Scammers will send out fictitious requests and provide you with a link to log in to your account. But this is not going to be the 'real' web site, this is known as "phishing". Phishing web sites are made to mimic businesse's and organization's 'real' web sites for the purpose of deceiving and defrauding you.

To know if a web site is a phishing web site look in your web browsers address bar. For example if you use Chase as your bank and you receive an e-mail that appears to be from Chase. You click on the link in the e-mail. Now look in your web browsers address bar to see what web site you have really been taken to. For example, in the case of Chase bank, their real web site is chase.com. So if the web address in your web browser's address bar is chasei.com, chaser.com or chase.us.com or something other than chase.com or www.chase.com, these would be phishing sites.

The best way to avoid phishing sites is to have the web sites "bookmarked" in your web browsers "Favorites" list. If you setup an account on chase.com then at that time while your on the real Chase web site, bookmark the web site in your 'Favorites'. Then if you do get an email claiming you need to correct a problem with your Chase account, use the link in your favorites NOT the link in the e-mail to log in to your account and check for messages. You could also just type the web site address into the web browser's address bar instead of clicking on a link or a 'favorite'.

I hope and pray that you do not fall for this scam!