Today’s Scam of the day comes directly from my own email and I am sure it has turned up in yours as well.  PayPal is a popular payment service used by many people particularly with eBay.  Therefore it can seem plausible when you receive an email that purports to come from PayPal asking you to clear up an undisclosed problem with your account.  However, anyone responding to the email copied below would either end up providing personal information to an identity thief or merely by clicking on the link could download keystroke logging malware that will steal the information from your computer and use it to make you a victim of identity theft.  DO NOT CLICK ON THE LINK.

Confirm your account with PayPal Dear User, Your account has been temporarily Limited if you want unlock it please check it from here: Click Here Receive cross-border payments from the many countries that PayPal serves. Withdraw your payments to the bank account you selected. Become verified and remove your spending limit. NOTE: If this is not resolved within 24 hours, we will be forced to susupend your account Permanently as it may be used fraudulently. The purpose of this verification is to ensure that your account has not been fraudulently used. Yours sincerely, PayPal

This particular phishing email is not particularly sophisticated. Although it came with what appears to be a legitimate PayPal logo, that logo is easy to counterfeit.  More importantly It came from an email address of a private person rather than that of PayPal.  The address used, most likely is that of someone whose email account and computer was hacked in order for the identity thief to send out these phishing emails in mass quantities. It also is not directed to me personally, but rather uses the salutation, “Dear User,” which is another indication that this is just a phishing scam.  There also is a spelling error in the word “susupend” which should be “suspend” as well as the improper capitalizing of the word “Permanently.”  These are both indications that the email is not legitimate.

TIPS

The primary question we all face when we receive such an email asking for personal information or urging us to click on a link is how do we know whether to trust the email or not.  The answer is, as I always say, trust me, you can’t trust anyone.  Regardless of how legitimate such emails appear, you should not provide any personal information or click on any links until you have independently verified by phone call or email to an email address that you know is accurate that the request for personal information is legitimate.