So won’t the real PayPal please stand up?
Posted on February 26, 2007
Filed Under Web Marketing
Email marketing is a highly effective medium used online to communicate with consumers. Unfortunately some of these emails we chose not to subscribe to, still manage to get pass the filters and into our inbox. Despite the efforts of configuring your email options to filter out unwanted emails, spammers spend all their days trying to find new ways to by pass those filters. Some of these unwanted emails are very tricky and can be deceptive, causing you to take action due to impersonation. They are also known as Phishing Scammers.
Recently, I received an email from our friends at PayPal, or so they say. This caught my eye because of the ‘from’ name and subject line which read ‘New Email Address Added’. Immediately paranoia of unauthorized activity with my PayPal account caused me to open the email.
As I opened the email, I realized that this address is not registered to my account with PayPal. So I asked myself the questions. How did PayPal get this email address? At this point I knew this was not from PayPal but from an imposter. Here is what the email said.
“You’ve added an additional email address to your PayPal account. If you don.t agree with this email tcgrady@emailaddress.com and if you need assistance with your account, please click here to login to your account.
To make sure you can use your PayPal account the next time you make a purchase, all you need to do is confirm or not your email address. If your email program has problems with hypertext links, you may also confirm your email address by logging in to your account.Â
Thank you for using PayPal!
The PayPal Team
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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 click the Help link located in the top right corner of any PayPal page.
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PayPal Email ID PP059â€
The links within the email were also clear indication that this was not from the real PayPal. Recently, there has been an increase of fake PayPal emails circulating the web. There’s really no way to avoid these. The best way to deal with fradulent PayPal emails, is to do the following.
- Never click on any of the links included in the email
- Do not reply to the email
- Report it to spoof@paypal.com
- Only log-in to your account by visiting www.paypal.com
To find more information about these types of emails, you can visit PayPal.com. It gives you detail information on how you can protect yourself from fraudulent emails.
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