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Hi,
It seems that with the onset of global economic “meltdown” email scams are on the rise.
Here’s one that found its way into our inbox this morning (June 4th 2009). It’s a Paypal phishing site (here is an explanation of phishing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing). And is designed to steal not only your paypal username & password, but also to get as much information about you in order to steal your identity.
The sender of the email was mentioned as 
Here’s a screenshot of the email we received this morning:
The email is very believable, and when an unsuspecting user click the link he is taken to a site that looks identical to paypal in all aspect (but one)!
Here’s what the website looks like:
Here’s how you tell there is a problem: look at the top of the page where you see the site name starting with “http://”
You can see this isn’t PayPal website. This is a site designed to look and feel just like paypal with one purpose only. To get you to enter your user name and password.
So our brave spirits decided to play the game and we proceeded to sign into a fictitious paypal account which doesn’t exist.
We entered the email address mickey@disney.com with some obscure password that we made up on the spot.
To our surprise we got the “paypal” logging in screen.
The yellow dots have the real movement just like in the real paypal site.
The following screen that was presented to us was “Confirm billing and credit card information”
Note the social security number request? Online shopping sites don’t require your social security number, if they ask for anything it will be for your last 4 digits of the social.
The form also requested date of birth, driver license number, and 2 security questions.
Just for fun, we typed in some data to see what happens next.
Upon pressing the “confirm My Account” button we received a highly believable confirmation page:
Don’t full yourself. This isn’t the real paypal site as can be seen from the address of the website:
Avoid getting “phished” by using common sense, being diligent and most of all, always, but always check the address of the site which starts with a “http://” or “https://”
if you’re still not 100% sure if the site you’re on is the real one, try entering a random username & password and see what happens. If you’re logged in successfully, chances are you’re being “phished”
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