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Phishing


Lemonade

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I get my fair share of phishing emails and I can usually spot them a mile off. However I got one this morning from Paypal which as well as looking completely convincing, was addressed to me personally, using my full name. it looks exactly the same as all the other emails I've had from Paypal and it said I had reached by spending limit, I was worried somebody had hacked my account cos I don't really use it. To be on the safe side I opened a new browser and chapped in www.paypal.com to log in and check my history but there's no transactions and it was bullshit, there were no transactions, so it must be fake. This is the first time I've had an email come to me personally. So how did they get my name?

paypal.gif

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Probably just pulled the name associated with your email address. I just did a google search of your address and it's not hard to find out your name. If you have a public profile on a site with your email and your full name listed it would be easy for them to build a target list using people's details from that site. Most probably ebay or social networking sites.

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That seems a lot of hassle to go to to target one guy, I thought they usually just sent out huge volumes of generic emails to thousands of email addresses picked up off the web.

They write automated spiders to trawl sites intelligently and collect info, infact they will pay coders (often eastern europeans heh) to write bots to target specific sites.

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Dear ----------,

Thanks for taking an active role by reporting suspicious-looking emails.The email you forwarded to us is a phishing email, and our security team is working to disable it.

-------------------------What is a phishing email?-------------------------

Phishing emails attempt to steal your identity and will often ask you toreveal your password or other personal or financial information. PayPal will never ask for your password over the phone or in an email and will always address you by your first and last name. Take our Fight Phishing Challenge at https://www.paypal.com/fightphishing to learn 5 things you should know about phishing. You'll also see what we're doing to help fight fraud every day.

-------------------------You've made a difference.-------------------------

Every email counts. By forwarding a suspicious-looking email to spoof@paypal.com, you've helped keep yourself and others safe from identity theft.

Thanks,

The PayPal Team

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