Paypal phishing scam

You may received another one of these emails. Usually they will warn about a problem with your account and asked that it be reverified when all it does is to trick you into keying in your username and password and then using that info to make illegal transactions.

This time however you may be informed of a 'purchase' that you have recently 'made'.

Of course, knowing that you have not made any such purchase, it alarms you and the first instinct is to click on that link to cancel the transaction.

When you click that link it will bring you to a phishing site that looks familiar to you. It looks the same as the real PayPal site that you visited all these while. You login and by then your account have been compromised.

There are some things you can do to protect yourself. Reading my earlier post will arm you will the knowledge required to protect yourself.

If all that is too technical, then the easiest thing you can do is

1. DO NOT CLICK on such links.
2. Go to WWW.PAYPAL.COM directly and verify if you have indeed made such purchases.

Phishing

This is for those who are still in the dark about phishing. Phishing means a bogus site that masquerades as the real site.

Look at the screenshot below that shows a site that looks like PayPal



If it's the real PayPal, then the address bar will usually show http://www.paypal.com and not numbers (which are IP addresses) like the ones in the picture above.

However, that does not mean that you cannot use IP address to visit PayPal website but you need to make sure that the IP address you use is correctly pointing to the real PayPal website.

To do that, go to this site. There, choose LOOKUP and enter the URL, in this case www.paypal.com, in the box.

For www.paypal.com, the results are these

IP address: 66.211.168.193
Host name: www.paypal.com
66.211.168.193 is from United States(US) in region North America

Therefore, by entering http://66.211.168.193 and http://www.paypal.com in your browser should bring you to the true PayPal website.

Clearly, the IP address 213.242.251.60 in the screenshot above, which differs from official records, are fake and pointing to a machine to harvest your real account details.

The details of this fake website are as below

IP address	213.242.251.60
Location	RU, Russian Federation
City	Yekaterinburg, 71 -

Also, reputable sites like paypal will not have an unsecured login page with. Secured login page will start with https:// eg https://www.paypal.com. Sometimes even fake sites do provide a secured page, so to ensure that you are visiting the right secured page, click on the security tab, usually an icon of a lock at bottom of your browser, to verify that the certificate assigned to the site is authentic.