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.

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 you personally as PayPal would do with all of its legitimate communications which is an indication that this is a phishing scam.  Finally, the words “recent” and “activity” improperly appear as “Recentactivity” without a space between the two words.

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.

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