# Paypal Phishing



## mpe1329 (Sep 1, 2007)

Don't know if this is the right forum to raise this, but I recently signed up for Paypal to pay for fish/plant related purchases online and have since been receiving about a dozen Paypal-related phishing e-mails a week re non-existent problems with my account, fictitious shipments, etc. The first fictitious shipment one got me because I had just received a similar one for an item I actually purchased through paypal. May be a coincidence but later that day, my new PC crashed for the first time. I've never had this experience before with an online business. Does Paypal sell e-mail addresses of its customers or is it just incredibly easy to hack into their database? I'm going to delete without reading all paypal related e-mail and will likely cancel my account but was just wondering if this is a common problem.


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## AaronT (Apr 26, 2004)

I have never received an email from paypal that needed responding to. That's a pretty good indicator of a scam. Make sure to report them to paypal.

I did have someone from the Ukraine try to hack my account once. They immediately shut my account down and I had to go through some steps to reactivate it and reset the password. I was very pleased with their response.


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## hoppycalif (Apr 7, 2005)

I have been using Paypal for at least 5 years, and I don't recall ever receiving an email from them other than the notices about payments and deposits, so I just mark any other emails that claim to be from them as junk mail. I use a Mac, so opening such an email and even clicking on the link isn't particularly dangerous. I did click links a couple of times and immediately noted that the internet address the link was trying to open was definitely not Paypal, so I immediately shut down my browser, and have never tried that again.


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## Bert H (Mar 2, 2004)

I get them every couple of months it seems. Just delete it and/or report it to paypal. The only e-mails I get from paypal is to say I've received a payment.


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## John N. (Dec 11, 2005)

I doubt paypal sells their customer emails. I used to receive these phishing emails all the time. Unfortunately I actually fell for one, got money stolen and later had it returned (via paypal fraud squad). I no longer receive the emails anymore after reporting them to paypal's spoofing squad. I've been a member of paypal since it's inception, but only had this one problem.

-John N.


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## jazzlvr123 (Apr 29, 2007)

I have gotten many e-mails like that, ones titled "receipt for your payment" for places i did not purchase from. I always check my balance to make sure, and then once i see that no money was taken out i just delete the E-mails, its just some kinda scam


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## JanS (Apr 14, 2004)

Yes, it's common to get the phishing e-mails, but you can always tell if they are for real by them addressing you by your Paypal user name, or the fake ones saying something like "Dear Paypal customer". As stated above, Paypal never asks you to reply directly to the link in the e-mail, so it's easy to distinguish them.

It's always best to forward/report the suspicious ones to [email protected] so they can nip the phishers in the bud.


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