I wanted to take a minute to talk about the imfamous “Paypal User Agreement Updated” email that you probably receive from time to time regardless if you have paypal or not.  In case you didn’t know, Paypal will never:

• Send an email to you addressed to “Dear PayPal User”, or anything like that.  Paypal will always include your first and last name or the business name in the email
• Ask you to enter your password or share any personnal information in an email.  In fact paypal and many other companies will recommend to you that you always type in the company web address in your web browser and then log into your account
• Include attachments of any kind that you need to open, or software to install on your computer

Now with that in mind, the below email example is the typical fradulent email that you will find in your email inbox:

________________________________________________

As part of our security measures, we regularly screen activity in the PayPal system. We recently noticed the following issue on your account:

Unusual account activity has made it necessary to limit account access until additional verification information can be collected.  Case ID: Number: PP-679-172-256

For your protection, we have limited access to your account until additional security measures can be completed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Note: If this is the second time you receiving this notice, it might be because you have made a mistake when you entered your details or the account was not updated.

Click here (Click here would be underlined to indicate a hyperlink.  In this example, the hyperlink is going to [weburl]zozzo.com/security/paypal-user-agreement/webscr/webcgi/cmd/index.html[weburl].  As you can see, this is clearly not the email address to paypal.  The main reason that paypal wants you to log into your account is because if you had any problems with your account, you would then be greeted with a message after logging into your account) to verify your account.

_________________________________________________

Also, take a quick note to see what email address this notice was sent to.  You may even find out that this email address is not listed on your paypal account.  That is a very good indicator that a spammer got the address and is just going phishing.

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 16th, 2006 at 10:20 pm and is filed under Email Phishing, Email Scams.