PAYPAL USERS BEWARE!!!

[Gabethebabe]

Today I got this message:

PayPal Bank Account Services
----------------------------------------------------------------
                    VERIFY YOUR CREDIT/DEBIT CARD


You have received this email because we have strong reason to believe
that your eBay account had been recently compromised used by a third party
without your authorization. In order to prevent any fraudulent activity from
occurring
we are required to open an investigation into this matter. To speed up this
process, you are
required to verify your eBay infos by following the link below.To complete
falow the link:
http://www.paypal.scgi-php.com?pp=&co_partnerId=2&ru=http%3A%2F%2Fmy.PayPal.com%3A80%2Fws%2PayPal.dll


To complete the verification  process you must fill in all the required fields


Please Note - If your account informations are not updated within the next
72 hours, then we will assume this account is fraudulent and will be suspended.
We apologize for this inconvenience, but the purpose of this verification is to
ensure
that your eBay account has not been fraudulently used and to combat fraud.

We appreciate your support and understanding, as we work together to keep PayPal
safe place to trade.


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THIS IS FAKE!!!! If this happens to you, do not enter password or creditcard data! I verified the fakeness by adding a username and false password en it sent me to the next page!!

BEWARE BEWARE BEWARE!!!

[Gandalf_The_White_1]

This is a fairly common ploy.  Pretty much anything that trys to get you to enter credit card infromation should be viewed as suspect, ovbiously.

Perhaps a general thread on how not to get fucked/scammed online would be apropriate as well?

[Gabethebabe]

Yeah, I´m cooled down a bit now after warning for this message here on MTGnews and on MOTL.

This is the first time this happened to me and it doesn´t happen very often that I was on the verge of throwing away a couple of thousand dollars.

Damn, I had already entered the data but pressed exit at the last minute.

Sooo close. And I don´t consider myself very stupid. Just click the link and imagine the amount of people that will fall for it and see the bank account emptied.

[Gandalf_The_White_1]

Yeah, I´m cooled down a bit now after warning for this message here on MTGnews and on MOTL.

This is the first time this happened to me and it doesn´t happen very often that I was on the verge of throwing away a couple of thousand dollars.

Damn, I had already entered the data but pressed exit at the last minute.

Sooo close. And I don´t consider myself very stupid. Just click the link and imagine the amount of people that will fall for it and see the bank account emptied.

It's not a matter of intellectual intelligence, but rather whether or not you are informed/computer smart.  These kinds of things can happen to anyone.  Thus, although I am too lazy and/or ignorant to start a thread about it, perhaps some of the computer geniuses on TMD can step foreward and educate the community about how to protect themselves.  (It should probably be sticked also.)

Edit: If nobody does, then maybe I'll just start a thread with what meager know-how I posess and get people to post on it .

[rvs]

This is TEH INTARWEB. Scams like this are going on 24/7, and will keep going on as long as people are stupid. It's really nothing new.

[Bram]

Yeah well this one is freakin' good. Just look at it! I might have fallen for it had I gotten the email, and I'm not the most trusting person in the world. Goddamn bastards.

[Jacob Orlove]

I get those from ebay all the time. I just forward them to spoof@ebay.com

also, a basic user wanted to chime in:

I had wanted to provide what I know in regards to the phishing thread about PayPal in order to possibly save a few members from becoming identity theft victims.

Anyway, should you feel like copy/pasting this into that thread; here are a few pointers to avoid becoming the victim:
- If it's a financial entity's site, the URL should ALWAYS start with "https://"  The 's' denotes a secure site which utilizes a particular layer of the internet protocol's security model while transferring sensitive personal data, which will be the only classification of valid financial website will use.
 
Here are the relevant links to educate oneself regarding safety from identity theft on the sites most heavily trafficed by TMD community:
 - for eBay: http://pages.ebay.com/help/account/mpi-account-theft-spoof.html
 - for PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen/email-security

Thanks,
James

[dandan]

I get emails like that about once a week and my email is not heavily spammed (I had to stop using geocities/yahoo/lycos because of too much spam, even with filters taking out 90% of spam, I still had less than 10% good mail). I get the Nigerian letter (in various incarnations about twice a week. I get viruses about 2-5 times a day.

I can't understand how people who use the internet regularly can fail to know about stuff like this.

On the other hand, I have a webiste where I offer holiday accommodation in Slovakia (www.tatranka.sk) and when someone books the cottage they have to send 30% of the payment by bank transfer. I have been doing this for about 4 years and only one person has ever asked 'How do I know you have that cottage and not just some photos and a website?'.
People are soooooooo trusting.

(I do in fact have Chata Rebeka, Chata Tatranka belongs to my in-laws)

Does anyone here know of a scam from someone called F.GEORGE, email sttar lazem sttarjlazem@yahoo.com ? He claims to be from Iraq, working for a chain of newspapers interested in buying whatever we are selling. I have replied to him twice just because I am curious and so far there are no demands for money, bank details etc but the emails scream SCAM to me. Anyone know about this one?

[Gabethebabe]

I get those from ebay all the time. I just forward them to spoof@ebay.com

That´s what I did.

If you´ve got messages like this before, no problem. I get viruses and Nigerian letters all the time and just have a good laugh over them. The problem arises when it´s the FIRST time you get a message like this and you´ve never seen a similar example, maybe just heard some vague rumours.

If you´re sitting there monday morning after a heavy weekend I can imagine you´ve entered the data before realizing what´s happening.

[Sylvester]

Well, at least you got a bad phisher. A good one could do something like:
http://security.ebay.com/[long, serious-looking, string]@iLuvGoat.cx
Since you only see the beginning of the URL, the user thinks it's a link to security.ebay.com. In reality, everything before the @ is the user name, and the request goes to iLuvGoat.cx. I'm still waiting for unicode domain names "Yes Mum, the cyrillic [whatever] looks exactly like the latin one, but they're not the same."