All Things Vu

Email phishing is nothing new but I guess there’s still plenty of people falling for the scam otherwise I wouldn’t get one in my inbox.  Here’s a Paypal email phishing email that I recently received in my Yahoo mail.  How did I figured out it was a bogus email?  It’s pretty simple if you look carefully.  First sign that this is a fake email is the sender’s email address.  The sender’s email is ‘no-reply@accountsettings.com’ but the email body states that it’s from paypal.com.  Most legitimate email from any company would end in @company-name.com. Second, and probably the most important sign that this is a phishing email, is that there is a “link” to verify your account.  Anytime there is a link embedded inside an email I would definitely not click on it.  Always go to the company’s website directly to log into your account.  Also, if you hover your cursor over the link (DO NOT click on it) you would see at the bottom of your browser that the link goes to some weird long-named URL.  That’s usually the tell-tale sign that the email is bogus.  Third and lastly the least important sign that this is not a legitimate email is that there is no info on you from the sender.  The email just say’s “Hello” to no name.  Wouldn’t an email from a company that has your info send you an email that would start out “Hello yourname,”.

If you happen to be lucky to get one of these make sure to report it to the real company so that the can make sure there customers are aware of the scam.  For Paypal you can report email phishing at spoof@paypal.com.  You probably won’t get a human reply email but you will get a computer generated general email stating that they received your email and won’t email you any further on the reported email.  Also, you can report the spammers to the Federal Government at phishing-report@us-cert.gov and they will use the it for their research.