PSA: A safety guide to your email, Paypal, and eBay!

[Achika]

As someone has stated previously, there seems to be a number of "Is this real?" posts regarding messages sent to your email box from a sender that claims to be from Paypal or eBay.




Dear Paypal (eBay) user:

Dear jsdldsljkjljk@hotmail.com,

Are not real opening lines. Paypal and eBay will BOTH use your first name on the account.



Your account is restricted

They will provide a number of reasons such as a security breach, an unauthorized person tried to access your account, they need to verify or update your account information, etc. After the reason, they will provide a link for you to click and login. IT IS VERY IMPORTANT THAT YOU DO NOT CLICK THE LINK If you really are unsure about the state of your account, log into "My eBay" or your PayPal account and verify that way.


You have added laptopseller@yahoo.com to your Paypal account

I have personally recieved two of these. Both had a false link to log in link. These emails are false. If you type the PayPal URL into your browser and go to your email profiles, you will see that laptopseller@yahoo.com is not there.

(I am leaving that persons email in this posting because if they are scamming people, they deserve all the spam bots that may scan these pages for emails)

Please remember that the first rule of thumb is to check on who the email is addressed to. If it's not the first name on the account, it's likely it's not real. If it's still bothering you, please log into your account after typing the URL in the browser, and NOT THE LINK IN THE EMAIL Report emails to spoof@ebay.com or spoof@paypal.com.

[Darth Vader]

Good PSA Achika! It's someone everyone should know. These fake emails have been around for about a year now and people should be careful with their paypal account.

Let me also reiterate what Achika stated before, ANY OFFICIAL EMAIL from paypal WILL have your name (that is registered on your paypal account) on it.

That is all.............

Danny

[Achika]

Just thought I'd give another heads up as there has been another Paypal scam that has been delivered to my inbox a few times now.

It looks like a normal Paypal reciept, usually with the subject line like:

Reciept for your payment to phonebuyer123

When I opened it, the 'payment reciept' said that I just sent $278.99 for a copy of Myst for PC. Clicking on the links in the email go to an obviously forged Paypal site (links point to some UK site, not Paypal or anything near it). The top of the email looks like any other payment reciept, but drops off into looking different lower down.

Upon typing in the Paypal URL into my browser and going into my account, no such payment has been made of course!

Don't forget, send all those 'phishing' and forged emails to the proper spot: spoof@ebay.com or spoof@paypal.com

[devilman]

Just thought I'd contribute with a new email I had a couple of times last week -



'Welcome to a community of sellers that have achieved exceptional levels of success and positive feedback on eBay!


We invite you to join us as a PowerSeller

If you agree with this rank please Become an eBay Power Seller within 24 hours

Very important!
The registration is active only once.

Why you become a PowerSeller?
PowerSellers are eBay top sellers who have sustained a consistent high volume of monthly sales and a high level of total feedback with 98% positive or better. As such, these sellers rank among the most successful sellers in terms of product sales and customer satisfaction on eBay. We are proud to recognize your contributions to the success of the eBay Community!

When you see this icon next to the member's user ID, be assured that the member is a qualified PowerSeller who not only maintains a solid sales record but also a 98% positive feedback rating based on transactions with other eBay users. You can feel assured that your transaction will go smoothly and that you are dealing with one who has consistently met the requirements established by eBay.

Reported it to Ebay and they confirmed it wasn't from them.

[greedostick]

i get these all the time. one of the more common ebay ones is the old TKO notice. I find it a good rule of thumb to never go to ebay or paypal through a link in your mail. Even if i win a auction i will go directly to ebay and pay from there. I will never pay for a ebay auction through a link in a email. I guess i must be doing something right, since i have done over 900 transactions and have not been breached yet.

Just use common sense people.

[Vroomfunkel]

I like to think that I can spot most of these, but this one had me going ... partly because it was 1am when I saw it, and partly because I have in the past had my account suspended for similarly obscure reasons ... fortunately my immediate thought was to surf to ebay and log in, and I saw that nothing had happened. Then it clicked ... :angry: Having just finished 50 odd auctions, I was having a panic about how I was going to sort it all out whilst getting re-instated. In the unlikely event that I ever encounter one of the !^R&£$-ing scammers who send these out, I will be selling his testicles on eBay shortly afterwards. I will give a 50% discount for DP members ... Anyway, aforementioned spoof email is as follows:


Dear (email address),

We regret to inform you that your eBay account has been suspended due
to concerns we have for the safety and integrity of the eBay community.

Per the User Agreement, Section 9, we may immediately issue a warning,
temporarily suspend, indefinitely suspend or terminate your membership
and refuse to provide our services to you if we believe that your
actions may cause financial loss or legal liability for you, our users or
us.

We may also take these actions if we are unable to verify or
authenticate any information you provide to us.

Due to the suspension of this account, please be advised you are
prohibited from using eBay in any way. This includes the registering of a new
account.

If you would like your account to be activated, please follow the link:

<FAKE LINK>

Once we have received this documentation, your account will be activated.

Regards,

Investigations Department
eBay Trust & Safety

[slapdash]

There's a new version of the spoofs... It looks like a valid eBay URL, but if you look further, they're using eBay's own referrer to send you to a different URL. Funny that eBay has a referrer, since it CAN be misused.

Just a quick course on identifying fake URLs (since this thread is a PSA); begin by rolling over the link without clicking it; at the bottom of your browser window you should see:

[1] http://www.scamURL.com

Easiest trick is to just have a link that LOOKS like a real URL, but goes to a scam site. Easily detected.

[2] http://www.realURL.com/something:somethingelse@http://www.scamURL.com

In this case, the '@' symbol is a dead giveaway; in some cases it will be encoded as %40 but it's the same trick. The reason this works is because the HTTP protocol allows a URI to have the form user:password@host, so what looks like a real URL is really a "user" on the scam site.

[3] http://www.realURL.com

Hmm, looks right... But in truth it is the same trick as in 2, only the "user" contains a whole bunch of spaces so you can't see it at the bottom. Damn clever. But of you right-click the link, copy it, and then paste it somewhere where you can see it all (like the address bar), you'll see that there's more too it.

[4] http://www.realURL.com/DomainReferrer=http://www.scamURL.com

I don't think I have the exact correct syntax here, but just seeing a second URL should give you pause. In this case, eBay has set up a function on their site to refer you to another domain, i.e. the scam site, and the scammers are taking advantage.

Are there any tricks I've missed? I suppose you could hide the actual link from being displayed by using Flash or Javascript, and you could always write a Javascript function that would show up at the bottom of the browser window rather than a URL, so that would be a sign too...