Beware! Fraudulent PayPal email.

sw33t_r3v3ng3

First off, apologies if this is the wrong forum.

Recently I've gotten a few emails from someone claiming to be PayPal. The email address is not from PayPal, its from gmx.com
The email looks pretty legit until you look at the email address. There is a "restore account" button which doesn't work. (Maybe that's just the case on mobile). Be careful, as someone not very observant could potentially give away there information unknowingly.

contents of the email:

Dear PayPal customer, 

PayPal is constantly working to ensure security by regularly screening the accounts in our system. We recently reviewed your account, and we need more information to help us provide you with secure service. Until we can collect this information, your access to sensitive account features will be limited. We would like to restore your access as soon as possible, and we apologize for the inconvenience.

Why is my account access limited?

Your account access has been limited for the following reason(s): 

We have reason to believe that your account was accessed by a third party. We have limited access to sensitive PayPal account features in case your account has been accessed by an unauthorized third party. We understand that having limited access can be an inconvenience, but protecting your account is our primary concern. 


Please proceed with account restoration:


Restore Account 

If we do not receive the appropriate account verification within 24 hours, we will assume your account is fraudulent and will be suspended.
Copyright © 1999-2015 PayPal. All rights reserved.

PayPal (Europe) S.a r.l. et Cie, S.C.A.
Societe en Commandite par Actions
Registered office: 22-24 Boulevard Royal, L-2449 Luxemburg
RCS Luxemburg B 118 349

As you can see, the footer of the email has the PayPal HQ address and looks pretty legit. Hope this was somewhat helpful!

Sam Mac

These emails are common and very well-known. Just don't click any links, and instead login to your account yourself manually.

sw33t_r3v3ng3

Sam Mac wrote:

These emails are common and very well-known. Just don't click any links, and instead login to your account yourself manually.

And also worth mentioning not to enter any information unless you type paypal.com into the address bar manually.

lulu1

I got a few emails similar to this but knew it was a scam because it was sent to an email address i have that is not even linked to paypal

Ken.

Paypal have an email address that they ask people to send spam/spoof mail too. They normally reply to me within 2-3 days saying yes it was spam and thanks for forwarding. The address is spoof@paypal.com

pleasant Co.

They've never replied to me :P

ohnonotgmail

pleasant Co. wrote: »

They've never replied to me :P

I havent received a reply from the spoof@paypal.com address since the end of February. It was working up to that point.

Virtanen

You'd swear some people have never seen spam before. Just delete it and move on, it's not that difficult

sw33t_r3v3ng3

Virtanen wrote:

You'd swear some people have never seen spam before. Just delete it and move on, it's not that difficult

Trust me I've seen spam. I just created this thread as some people aren't as aware of things like this as others are. If you've nothing constructive to say then kindly move along, thank you

lulu1

sw33t_r3v3ng3 wrote: »

Trust me I've seen spam. I just created this thread as some people aren't as aware of things like this as others are. If you've nothing constructive to say then kindly move along, thank you

Yes you are right my daughter shops on e bay and uses pay pal and I know if she got an email like this she wouldnt think and i am sure she would reply as would plenty of others

rubadub

lulu1 wrote: »

Yes you are right my daughter shops on e bay and uses pay pal and I know if she got an email like this she wouldnt think and i am sure she would reply as would plenty of others

My simple rule is that if paypal or a bank need to contact you or send you a message they will get the message to you. They are not stupid enough to presume that every single email they send will get to customers, many peoples filters would delete any emails like this, genuine or not.

The next time you log onto ebay/paypal/bank/whoever you and be pretty sure any important/vital notification will be waiting for you.

When I get a suspicious email the first thing is to is check who the sender was. Then you can take a snippet of the email and google it using "quotes", this forces google to search for the exact phrase. So in this case I picked

"We have limited access to sensitive PayPal account features in case your account has been accessed by an unauthorized"

I try and pick a section with no puncuation marks and no personal info, a section I expect to be in all scam emails. Entering this in google got lots of reports of it being a scam.

looksee

In fact Paypal did send me an email recently which quoted the last four digits of my Credit card and said that as it was nearly out of date I should contact them and update my information. This was accurate.

This was a genuine email, I have little doubt of that, but still I did not respond to it. I will contact Paypal directly through their site and update my information.

I can see that they had to contact me, but I as default, ignore all emails asking about log in details, financial information, or anything of that sort. Maybe some day I will miss something important, but I would rather take that chance than risk responding to any of the emails.