PayPal Scam Strikes Again

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Here's another paypal scam attempting to catch you unawares. 

Couple of dead-giveaways for you in case you are wondering how to spot these well-worded little ploys.

1. The first thing you should know about Paypal: they will always address you by name.  So if you don't see something like "Dear Hans Eisenman," in the beginning of the message, you know right away the email is false and just an attempt at stealing your identity (and thus your money).
2. If you place your mouse over the link (in the message below its the "https://www.paypal.com...", without clicking on it sometimes it will show you the ACTUAL link. So in the case of this one, if you mouse over it, you should see this link: http://86.80-203-198.nextgentel.com/attachments/.www.paypal.com/webcr.php?cmd=LogIn Note that the part after "http://" is NOT a paypal address.   It says "www.paypal.com" in it if you read down a bit, but the point is, the supposed email address (the one they are showing you in the email) is not the same as the one when you mouse over the link.  So that's another oddity.  Disclaimer: You might not want to use this point as your sole determination that an email is a safe or not, because these criminals can get pretty tricky about how they make an email look safe when they are really traps.

What you can always do, even if you're not sure of what to do
In every case, the safest thing to do, if you have any question at all about an email is to disregard the email sent to you and then log in to the website in question directly.  So in this case, you would open Internet Explorer and manually type in www.paypal.com and log in.  If the email you received was valid and important, Paypal would show reach out to you as you are logging in and say what they want to say. 

Clicking on the link below could greatly effect the security of your PC so don't take these warnings lightly. 

You probably already know all this, but because these phishing attempts keep getting more and more polished, and this one I receive below was a new angle (a message about "your security" not less), I thought I'd take a moment to reiterate ways to see through their criminal schemes.

 

Protect Your Account Info Make sure you never provide your password to fraudulent websites. To safely and securely access the PayPal website or your account, open a new web browser (e.g. Internet Explorer or Netscape) and type in the PayPal URL to be sure you are on the real PayPal website. PayPal will never ask you to enter your password in an email. For more information on protecting yourself from fraud, please review our Security Tips at https://www.paypal.com/us/securitytips Protect Your Password You should never give your PayPal password to anyone, including PayPal employees. Account Review Departament Team Identity protection matters. And PayPal works day and night to help keep your identity safe. That's why we created a new Identity Protection area for update your PayPal records to help you increase your privacy and protect your identity. https://www.paypal.com/us/webscr?cmd_login-run All restricted accounts have their billing information unconfirmed, meaning that you may no longer send money or from your account until you have updated your billing information on file. We apologize for any inconvenience. Sincerely, PayPal Account Rewiew Departament.  Please do not reply to this email. This mailbox is not monitored and you will not receive a response. For assistance, log in to your PayPal account and choose the Help link located in the top right corner of any PayPal page. To receive email in plain text instead of HTML. update your preferences here