Forged Pay Pal "account verification spam email has become a popular ruse for identity thieves these days.

Way back in 2003 I started to receive them but most of the emails had poor spelling and grammar, or were just plain sloppy!

But times have changed!

The Pay Pal Scam has got better and now I am seeing a slight variation on the usual email I receive more here.

The other day I received the email in the image below. It was sent to my email address that I use at PayPal and REALLY looked convincing for a moment...

I use Paypal on a regular basis and my first thought was that someone had somehow go into my account and used it... Just what the sender of the email wanted me to do!

However to check this I would NOT use the link given in the email!

...I would always want to log into PayPal by typing in www.paypal.com into my browser and check that way.

(So I did just that and all was OK with my account - always worth checking even if you suspect the email is fake.)

So my next response was to look a little more at the email.

On hovering my mouse over the link that the sender wanted me to click I found that it was a really odd address - it SHOULD have started with https://www.paypal.com/

You can see the URL in the image below:

DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!

..so I then checked the "Email Header" for more clues and found that it had the following entry:

Message-ID: <20060317090807.17374.qmail@lx107.siteturn.com>

..instead of something like:

Message-Id: <1134765264.556@paypal.com>

A quick look online for the website www.siteturn.com reveals it to be a web hosting company in the US.

The URL of email link takes you to a small business website about cat ceramics, initially before you are "re-directed" to a business website in India.

...BUT it does not stop there!

On that Indian website is hosted a very clever Pay Pal "look alike" website. Put your login details there and they are actual "stolen" by some-one using a script at a Russian public sports website called http://www.sportline.ru

NOW all these website owners are INNOCENT.

They have just fallen victim to some very clever "spoofing" to actually hide the real scam artist...

But it does go to show you just how much effort these criminals will go to.

The really sad thing is that some folks will have fallen for this and had their Paypal accounts "stolen" from them!

Be careful and stay vigilant...

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Marc Liron - Bio
Microsoft Digital Media MVP
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This page was last updated 15th March 2006

Pay Pal Scam

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