Phishing Expedition
Phishing (pronounced fishing) is when a con artist hacker is attempting to trick the recipient of an email into surrendering private information.
Con men use private mail boxes to register domains for phishing scams. Here is a picture of the street address I looked up through Google Earth.
The SPAMMER con is usually looking to get the reader to send them sensitive financial and security information such as bank account passwords and numbers.
In the case of the phishing email I received this morning this bold SPAMMER told me that I had been locked out of my PayPal account and if I want to get back in I need to send them everything from my drivers license to my credit cards, utility bills and first born child!
Needless to say I didn’t follow through, but they did a pretty good job of trying to make this email legitimate and I had just by chance used my pay pal account about an hour before so they may have hooked me in if I wasn’t aware of what phishing is all about.
The first thing you will notice in the email is that the email address for PayPal has the wrong domain name of paypail.com.
Next you will notice that rather than a name of an individual or company in the quote marks in the sending email address the name appears as an email address” “service@paypal.com”. ”
Now the paypal domain is legit, but they would never use it in the name portion of the address and PayPal has a strict policy of never requesting sensitive financial information by email.
I looked up the owner of the paypail.com domain and it is registered to a private mail box at a UPS store in Bellevue Washington here is the address for all who may want to send this guy a personal love note:
PMB 368, 14150 NE 20th St – F1
C/O paypail.com
Bellevue, WA 98007
US
Of course this guy is using a privacy protection agent for his domain registration and he probably hasn’t used the private mail box address since he registered the domain in 2004.
Here is the email I received.
Notification of Limited Account Access “service@paypal.com” service@paypail.com
Tuesday, November 18, 2008 1:26:29 AM
To:Robb Cheuvront robb@######.###
Dear Robb Cheuvront ,
PayPal Resolution Center: Your account is limited.
Why is my account access limited?
As part of our security measures, we regularly screen activity in the PayPal system. During a recent screening, we noticed an issue
regarding your account:Our system detected unusual number of invalid logging attempts on you account from these blacklist ip address.
(Your case ID for this reason is PP-0042310.)
How can I restore my account access?
For your protection, we have limited access to your account until additional security measures can be completed. We apologize for any
inconvenience this may cause. In order to assist us with this security measure, we ask that you send us a photocopy or scan documents listed
below and return them via email to security@paypalfraudcheck.com :- A clear copy of your Passport or Photographic Drivers Licence or I.D. Card (both sides).
- A clear copy of both sides of the credit/debit card on your Paypal profile.
- A clear copy of a recent bank statement or utility bill on which your name and address are clearly visible – less than 3 months old.
Completing all of the checklist items will automatically restore your account access
Thank you for using PayPal!
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Please do not reply to this email. This mailbox is not monitored and you will not receive a response. For assistance, log in to your PayPal
account and click the Help link located in the top right corner of any PayPal page.