If people are desperate, perhaps they want to hack into a PayPal account and spend away to pay bills or whatever else they need. Of course, I do not search looking how to ruin other people's financial lives, but I do come across interesting things when I search the Internet.

Recently, I came across a PayPal hacking scam that requires PayPal users (these members believe that they will become hackers into other people's PayPal accounts) to confirm their mailing address and send all of their personal information to a Yahoo! or Hotmail e-mail address, that is supposedly (btw, it's not) a "mailerbot" that PayPal uses on Yahoo! or Hotmail servers. After following the steps that the "master" hacker has provided, you are supposedly going to get the personal information of recent sign-ups.

Sound fishy? Hopefully, it does. The mailerbots are personal e-mail accounts used by other hackers to gain access to your account. How do I know? Simply search Google or your favorite search engine for how to hack PayPal and you'll notice one thing: all of the e-mail addresses that you are supposed to send your personal information to are different!

What's the point of this thread? It's to make sure that people don't get taken advantage of because an e-mail or "Internet offering" takes hold of an emotion such as greed and, in the process, ruins your financial life by requiring you to perform some act that will place your very private information in the hand of criminals.

As said by countless other people and websites, be smart about giving out personal information.

If any of you have feedback, suggestions about keeping personal information safe, or simply general comments about anything related to this subject, please leave a post in this thread.

EDIT: Look at these Google results for the exact details of the scam. REMEMBER THIS IS A SCAM! DO NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT DOING IT!
http://www.google.com/search?q=hack+...hl=en&lr=&biw=

That's a good reminder: time to embark on another brief round of customer education.

Thanks for the warning Marc. I think I remember seeing something like this on ebay. I knew it was fishy when I saw it

I got one of these emails last night. At least I am pretty sure it was a scam or whatever.

BUT, the only thing that clued me in that it wasn't from PayPal was ... it was sent to an email account different than the one I use for PayPal.

It had the PayPal logo at the top ... a little blurb on 128-bit encryption ... the PayPal Verified logo at the bottom ... and the following as "the middle"

It looks official ... sounds official ... the ONLY thing is, the link provided does not go to PayPals secure server ... if you look at the "message source" into you can see it goes to whoever owns IP 65.254.36.119. I suspect if anyone clicks on the link it will take you to an official looking page that you would think is actually PayPal ... and when you cut and paste the link into your browser it actually does take you to a PayPal login page.

I've reported it and sent a copy to PayPal's Fraud dept.

But people ... just be real careful.

My policy is ... I NEVER click on a link in an email unless its from a friend.

Take care
Peter

I think that as a good rule of thumb to stop getting scammed on anysystem is never click a link, if you want to goto the link, copy and paste it to prevent nasty supprises.

Peter (and everyone), there is a very simple way to tell if an e-mail even has a chance from being from PayPal: the greeting will address you by your first and last name or the business name used during sign-up.

I believe the e-mail that you received is the one used in the example on this PayPal Security Center page...
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/websc...ySpoof-outside

PayPal should send out notices to all its members about their "Security Center" or something. I do not use PayPal much and wasn't even aware of that link you posted. Thank you for that And since I have never received an email from PayPal except when I first signed up ... I never knew how they would address a "form letter".

I am just glad this letter showed up in an email account where most of the "spam" I get goes to. If it had shown up in a "real" email account I may have not clued into it ... if my brain wasn't firing on all cylinders that day.

Peter

The Security Center link is on the bottom of every PayPal page.

After inspecting the e-mail image a little closer, it looks like you got a different one, but that doesn't really matter, since they're all basically the same (with a little variation to keep people interested).

If you are ever unsure about the content of an e-mail message, you should always contact the company that appears to have sent it directly and ask them if it is legit.
PayPal contact page: https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/we...md=_contact_us

As I said ... I don't go to PayPal often and until last night when I went to their Contact page ... I don't think I ever paid attention to the bottom of any of their pages And before that I think it had been a year since I had gone to their site.

Yeah ... I did that last night immediately after I received the email. Actually, I reported it to their Fraud department or whatever they call it. Judging by their "Auto Response" ... it sounds like I got it to the right people That is something I do as a "rule of thumb". I used to report every spam email I got but these last 8 or so years ... there have just gotten to be too many. So now I only report the emails I feel are "dangerous" in that others might actually fall for them.

I'm amazed by such cheap trick and I think some greedy and naive people actually did what he posted.

I would never click on any link in my email unless i know that it's safe. If you click the link that you're not sure, the web site you go to may give you a virus. In April 2005, i spent a whole week scanning my computer and deleting a Trojan Horse that steals bank information and sends it to a remote computer or something. I got the Trojan Horse when i visited my affiliate's affiliate site. Norton Antivirus and McAfee couldn't delete the Trojan Horse until i used NoAdware...Norton sucks by the way, it creates a recycle bin on every drive to contain the infected files and spyware...So when you scan your computer, the spyware keeps coming up again and again...

I was reading something today and apparently, even those who think they'll never get caught by a phising scam, may fall prey. Phisers can make the address bar appear to be on a legitimate site, even when it is not. The address bar may read exactly like the legitimate site, however, you are actually on a phising site.

Thieves, as you may already know, may fake SSL certificates and a ton of other stuff to try and get you to divulge your personal information.

Last point for now: never click an unsubscribe link in a suspicious e-mail, it will most likely confrim that you are at an active e-mail address and you will receive more spam.

This is a total joke, they ask you for your personal information in order to provide you with another person's personal information. But what they are doing is getting your personal information and taking control of your account.

Thanks for sharing webfreak!

I get at least one Paypal spam and one eBay spam email a day. I ignore them all. I forward the Paypal ones to spoof@paypal.com and delete the eBay ones - I'm too lazy to look up their spoof email address.

Best rule of thumb, imo, is to ignore all those emails and go directly to their site and then login. If there are any issues with your account, you'll be informed then.

Thanks for the PayPal spoof email, I get a minimum of one daily aswell.

By having an active link to the PayPal spoof e-mail address, I wouldn't doubt it if that e-mail receives the phising e-mails as well.