Yesterday I've received some email that has an appearence of being from PayPal asking me to confirm my email address. The email said that I have to enter the PayPal site and enter the confirmation code that was in the email, the email had no attachments and only links to PayPal. I never reply to this kind of emails, I looked at the link and instead to be http://www.paypal.com it was a dns number/paypal. I use Firefox so I clicked the link to see what happens (never do this with IE!!!), the page opened and it was as a PayPal page with the windows for name and password, all the links were to the true PayPal site, of course that I didn't filled my name and password. The bastards had copied the PayPals page, all was of PayPal with exception of the destinary of the forms with your name and password, they really did a very good job, anyone can easily fall in this trap. I've forwarded the email to spoof@paypal.com. Never click the links of email, in case of doubt go directly to the site and never through the links of the email.

I get a lot of these emails. According to a couple that I got recently, both my Paypal & Ebay accounts have been locked for some reason or other. Didn't really read them before deleting them. I'm a suspicious type person & never click anything in an email but I do wonder how many people get taken in by these scammers..

Yep.. I too have gotten that and an EBay one before as well. Its sad what people will do. Thanks for sharing this with us! Ryuslilangel Moderator

I have it on good authority that Santa Claus does not actually exist, and that the guy in the red hood and the beard is actually just a guy in fancy dress, so watch out kids :D

I've seen a new variant of this. You get a paypal mail saying you've got cash. It looks like the standard paypal mail. Nothing to indicate it's fake, no spelling mistakes all the graphics, point to paypal. Only the link is different, it's given as an IP and not a human readable URL. I only knew something was wrong after mannually typing the real paypal address into a browser. Obviosuly I ALWAYS include the https://. No cash had arrived. Out of curiosty I copy/pasted the IP. Identical to paypals. Got another identical mail a few days later but the phishing site was down. Though it makes me wonder how many people had been caught out.

Those phishers use the site graphics and good names of any institution with a large enough online customer base: ebay, paypal, and most of the banks... including some I've never heard of, but are perhaps big back east. Some of the phishers are very good; others have stupid errors of grammar which indicate that they aren't native English speakers. (We who grew up speaking the language make mistakes, but they are different mistakes.) The only way to be safe is simply not click on a link in the email. Carolly

My spamfilter software lets me read an email from the POP3 server without doing any HTML processing. Some of them even cut-and-paste normal Paypal emails, and just use a different URL. First defence is the account name it's sent to, second is knowing who you do business with. I only have an account with one bank, and they don't know my email address anyway. If you're setting up an account with Paypal or eBay, and you have the resources to do so, use a unique email address. It can't be hidden if you want people to pay you, but you can safely ignore apparent Paypal or eBay emails to any other address. And, yes, I know some people have limits on how many usernames they can use. Trouble is, they usually subvert somebody else's machine to do this. It isn't easy to trace the criminal. So remember your own security -- firewalls, virus checks, updates. This is something making me a little nervous about the prospect of getting ADSL access.

Paypal (and other legimate sites) have an email address to forward this spoofs to so that they can investigate them (and the resources to do so that are greater than most individuals). Forward as an attachment to spoof@paypal.com.... they don't want these creepazoids around any more then any of the rest of us do.