how do you recognize a Spam and scam paypal email?
Since security is an ever increasing concern for everyone using the Internet, most of the time your fears can lead to your ignorance. You think that things are so complicated with understanding security on your pc that you just hope that everything is secure without having to worry about it. Although that is what we all want from our pc's you can always be sure that there is a way to somehow trick you into clicking somewhere and sending your details to someone who then buys a new holiday on your credit card.
With just a little understanding about what is happening you can spot a scam 50 miles away, even if your new to the Internet and not a geek. I'll take you through the cross examination of a particular scam that you might find in your email.
The paypal scam.
There is always someone sending you an email with notification of your limited account access. Now, most of the time if you use the Internet and sites like ebay you can be sure that you know what this means. Yes, its the dreaded halt on your payments! so initially if you where to see something like this in your inbox, you will be thinking the worse. However you must think that although you might have mcafee antivirus, and spyware detectors you can still easily stop everything with the firewall of your mind. All this means is that you are initially skeptical on any email or information that you know could be genuinely real, however you want proof first. You need to think about that when you are using the Internet. Its very easy to click here and there all over the Internet, but if your clicking on the wrong link for you, you can expect its the right link for someone else.
Ok, so the email was in my inbox, and it looked like a genuine negotiation email.
The first thing i noticed was that the email was sent to "undisclosed recipitant" It should be addressed to my email directly. This is the first clue to recognizing that something is fishy here. Now i just assumed this was a scam and looked for other reasons to confirm that. Fair enough though, if i checked through the next steps and they where ok, then although i would still be skeptical, i would avoid clicking on any link in your email in the first place. If your paypal account is limited, just go straight to paypal on the internet.
The next thing i noticed about this scam email was that it had a link on the bottom to a paypal.co.uk address, the good thing about links on the internet is that they always show on your bottom left of the browser the link in plain text. This way you can have a quick read to see what the link is. In this email it was pretty much "paypal.co.uk.cgi.prpft.cn"
The name of the website is actually prpft.cn, and the paypal part is just like a sub folder.
I checked the link though, and clicked it, as at that stage, there is still no trouble to your pc or browser. Now what happens next can be where the problem occurs. Sometimes a browser will recognize that the website you are going to is a scam website, and it will warn you to avoid. This is what happened to me and i was using chrome. However, sometimes they don't recognize them. Its only really once you've landed on that page that you can be vulnerable to a security risk. I'll talk about that in another hub shortly.