PayPal E-mail Scams

Fight against PayPal E-mail Scams:

Most of the identity theft events happen through the medium of e-mails that trick people to provide their personal information to the scammers. PayPal e-mail scams are some of the most common so people need to know more about them and about what it is to be done in these situations. First of all, one should know how to recognize fake messages that claim to come from PayPal:

- If you receive a message at an e-mail address that is not related to your PayPal account then you should not even open it.
- If the link within the message doesn’t lead to a website that begins with “https://”, then this is a scam – PayPal website is secure and the “s” shows that.
- Real messages from PayPal include your name because the company knows this information about the clients. If you receive messages that begin with something general like “Dear PayPal user” then you deal with PayPal e-mail scams.
- Typos and bad grammar are also signs of scams, as well as missing words.
- Most important than anything else, PayPal will never ask for private information about your account over e-mail.

When you receive such messages, you should not even click on the links to reach the website. The best thing to do, if you have the curiosity, is to load the PayPal webpage directly by writing the address in the browser’s address bar. Before doing so, however, scan your computer for spyware and restart the browser sessions. This way, you can be sure that you don’t risk filling fake forms with private information.

Before simply deleting what seems to fall in the category of PayPal e-mail scams, you should help the entities that fight against identity theft. Forwarding such messages to spoof@paypal.com can be very helpful as specialists will solve the problem with the fraud and stop the fake websites that are used by the authors of the messages. Also, you can forward the messages to spam@uce.gov so that the Federal Trade Commission to be able to deal with these PayPal e-mail scams as well.