I've heard of this email from various sources but never received one until tonight and I must say that it was very convincing.
I was surprised when the hosts on TechTV were even saying they were fooled for a minute but now I completely understand why.
The following are some large screenshots of the spam email and the fake PayPal site.
Although the email is in very plain and basic text, at first it doesn't look like spam coming with a return address of paypal.com. Even the link provided appears to be going to the correct paypal.com link to update your information.
The problems: For starters the email was not sent to my primary registered address and the link actually goes to another site looking almost identical to the real PayPal.
This page is so convincing that all the tabs work and are even linked to the real PayPal. It seems that this is the only page that's hosted on a foreign site.
There are a number of minor differences but not noticeable unless both sites are side by side. I have circled the two major issues with the address bar now showing a 3rd party URL and a missing lock indicating this is not a secure site.
For the record I did go to paypal.com and logged in through the front of their site and all is fine. No database crash (not that they wouldn't have backups anyway) and everything is fine, well for those that didn't get caught by this email.
Comments
Batman - October 22, 2003 10:44 pm
If you have a look at some stupid URL tricks, people trust the DNS altogether too much. Even if you ignore the insecurities in trusting a domain to really be where you are going, many sans serif fonts will make www.paypal.com and www.paypaI.com look the same. Also a lowercase l looks like the number 1 if you are running hires 1280x1024... tis' hard to tell..
:) So be sure to check that little lock icon, check out the trust chain on the certificate and be careful with money on the Internet.
<span style="font-family : Arial;">http://www.paypaI.com - not always what it seems.
i = I in caps. I (cap i) = l (lower L) with arial and others...</span>
Good luck,
Gotham Protector.
Steven Perry - October 23, 2003 1:52 am
That email isn't even close to being convincing. After getting a few from Paypal it obviously doesn't follow their usual structure.
Stephen DesRoches - October 23, 2003 10:46 am
It may not be convincing to someone that uses it all the time and expects a fancy html formated email with graphics but the majority of users would see an email from paypal.com, click the paypal.com link, see an identical paypal site and wouldn't think twice about filling out that info.
Stephen DesRoches - October 23, 2003 11:31 am
This is a real automated email from the PayPal systems.
<div align="center"><img src="local/newrecruit/images/blog/realpaypalemail.jpg" width="400" height="376" alt="Real PayPal Email" border="0" /></div>
Brad Pineau - October 24, 2003 12:48 pm
I received several of similar emails, only from ebay. They wanted to verify my account infomation.. It looked identical to an ebay page... all links on it went to the real ebay page.. only the URL was an IP address. I wrote to ebay and forwarded the email, and they assured me that they would never send such an email to customers.
Mella - November 3, 2003 4:30 pm
There's no need to analyze the structure of that message or compare it to 'real' ones. The truth is it is irresponsible to enter credit card information after following a link from *any* e-mail message. No reputable company would ever require you to do that, precisely because it is so easy to intercept or fake (moreover, no reputable company would ever "lose all accounts in the system due to a database crash" ...lol).
The responsible thing to do upon receiving an e-mail like that is to notify the company and inquire about its authenticity, and if you really feel worried about losing your account, go to the webpage by typing the address in your browser manually and look for the link to the official notice, which would be plainly visible on the homepage if the situation is for real.
--Mella
Stephen DesRoches - February 10, 2004 11:40 pm
Another Story about PayPal fraud.
tanker135 - February 19, 2004 12:00 pm
Hahahahah....
Register,make payment and take over paypal account is eazy..and eazy,actually paypal is not safety payment, but paypal maybe still the best for fraudulent activities until now.but actually paypal have fatal weakness in their system.
BECAREFULL WITH YOUR CREDIT CARD!!!
paypal admin : CORRECTIONS YOUR SYSTEM!!
VIVA INDONESIAN CARDER!!!!
Ryan - March 5, 2004 9:53 pm
So what's the domain of the fake paypal? Everybody is talking about it, I wanna see it ...
Paul - April 22, 2004 12:12 am
The e-mail listed above is clearly not convincing at all, however the "from" e-mail address can fool many. I received a letter today that was amazingly convincing, and I will give you a link to my Website where you can see screenshots of the whole event and strategies I used to determine that it is not a real site. http://honeytones.com/fraud