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Can You See the Red Flags in This PayPal Account Phishing Attempt

PayPal Phishing Email Screenshot
Click Image to Enlarge

It still surprises me the number of people that get taken by these types of spam emails, normally leading to malware installs, identity theft or other annoyances of life in the digital age. For me I hardly ever click on links in an email if I'm not expecting the email from someone already in advance. Even then I take a few quick seconds to scan the email and look for anything that seems fishy to me. Or should that be "phishy"?

Can you spot all the issues with this email I recently received:

  1. Misspelled the name of the company in the sender's name "Paypl service"
  2. Spammy looking email address! - this isn't always a reliable tell-tell sign to watch out, but more often than not it should give you a heads up. In this case the account name (prior to the @ symbol) seems odd, and in this case the server the email is coming from is also pretty sketchy looking
  3. Not always a red-flag (sadly) but there's numerous instances of letters being capitalized in the body of the message that shouldn't be if following standard grammatical rules
  4. Although not an alert all by itself, anything I see a link that's formatted as a button, I know there's opportunity for the things to be hidden, in this case we look at where the link is going to go by hovering over the link with our mouse in the browser and our browser telling us where in the bottom-left-hand corner
  5. Look at that link! //cat.jp.as.criteo.com/ now I'm going to stop right there because it's interesting to note that "Criteo" is a legitimate advertising platform, so these spammers appear to be either absolutely tracking their efforts of success or potentially spoofing this further to obscure their ploy. Taking a further look at the remaining part of the URL you'll see another website address being include after the "?r=" query string. That leads me to believe that link is being redirected even further to help cover their tracks

Here's another quick Public Service Announcement for you, don't just go clicking on links in emails even when they look like they're coming from legitimate sources. 

In this case, if you did indeed have a PayPal account and you were worried about it. Go to their website directly by opening your browser and typing in the URL of the company directly and visiting the site that way. Login to your account and see if there are any warnings or alerts posted there. If the company has a chat feature for support, send them a chat and have them verify if there are or are not any issues with your account that need to be addressed.

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What to Look For in Phishing Scams

Here’s a little public service announcement for everyone. Many of you may already be aware of this, but I’m thinking there may be a few people that see this link on my Facebook wall that this information may come in handy.

Phishing Scam Awareness

My general rule of thumb for most of my computer activity related to email and attachments I receive is to not trust ANY email from anyone at first glance. This has generally kept me fairly safe for over the last decade as I haven’t experienced any kind of debilitating computer virus on my system in that period of time.

I received this email the other day and it caught my attention initially because I do have some accounts with Chase Bank and do most of my banking online. However, on closer inspection, I saw that this was a phishing scam by some nefarious types.

The first thing I actually noticed was that the email was sent to “undisclosed recipients”. I kind of doubt Chase, if this was a serious email, would be sending it to a list of recipients. Their systems would probably be automated and send a single email to each recipient individually.

Anytime there’s a link in an email like the one in the image (#1), don’t click on it, just hover your mouse over the link. When you do, down in the status bar of your browser you should be able to see where the link is about to send you (#2).

As you can tell from this URL, it’s probably got nothing to do with Chase Bank, and is probably just an attempt to collect you personal information, perhaps bank account number and password. I didn’t click on the link, but I’m sure if I did, the page I would be directed to would look VERY official and “Chase-like”. It’s all a ruse!

So, be alert, yes, even distrusting when it comes to your email. You’ll probably be safer if you do. If you have any questions about the validity of an email that’s related to a company or service you actually use, just pick up the phone and call them directly to verify any questions they may have about your account or information.

Hope that helps.