Had an email yesterday , supposed to be from Pay Pal , saying my account had been compromised , giving me a ref number etc and asking me to go to a link and put in the PP password . Thought odd this , went direct to PP via my normal link and sent them a copy of the email , Answer its a fake . It looked very real even had PP logo link to website and everything . They have told me to cancell all cards on the genuine account . So be warned :eek:

No need to cancel all your cards! I get these all the while and I usually just delete them. The fact is Paypal will never send you an email like this. Never follow a link in any email. Always open a new browser, open the proper www.____ address and login properly.

Your bank accounts used on Paypal will not have been comprimised. Its just a spammer trying to fool you into supplying your details in a fake paypal site.

Yup, don't worry.

As J says though, I always open up a web browser and type in the URL rather than clicking on the link in an email.

I received exactly the same email as you did last night. But I knew it was fishy from the start - I have two email addresses I use and they sent it to the one my paypal account isn't registered to!

Depending on the email client you use, you have a status bar at the bottom that shows you the real url a link points to. Just like I can do www.paypal.com Go on, click it :P

You can always send any such emails to spoof @ paypal.com (without the spaces). They will confirm its a hoax, and I guess it helps to shut down these spammers

Got the same e-mail last night.

Thought it was a bit odd seeing as thought I don't have a Pay Pal account!

Went straight into the deleted items!

Oh, and something else which can be handy. Right click on the link they provide in the email and go to properties. Usually in all the cr4p that comes up, there's the actual recipient - and often its something like: [email protected]

Today I had:

One purportedly from HSBC telling me they were carrying out a "verification exercise" on accounts

One purportedly from eBay inviting me to become a power-seller

Yesterday I had one from Barclays. During the last week I have had one from Chase Manhattan, and probably some others.

Mostly it's obvious - I'm not a customer of either HSBC, Barclays or Chase. Other times, like the eBay one, it's not quite so obvious and you might be tempted. Whenever there's a link in the email, hover over it and see what the status bar in your browser says. Likely it'll have some obscure domain on the beginning, followed by what looks like a pukka url. The one I got this morning says:

http://****.org.tw/login/eBayISAPIdllSignInfavoritenav=2sid2=ruproduct=pp=co_partnerId=2ru=i1=ruparams=pageType=pa2=bshowgif=pa1=pUserId=errmsg=UsingSSL-runame-iteid=0/SignIn.htm

I've blanked out a bit of the domain but you can see it ends in ".tw" i.e. Taiwan

If hovering over it doesn't show anything in the status bar (or you're looking at the mail in a proper client rather than webmail), right click it, and select properties, then look at the URL displayed.

In any case as Jason said, these organisations would never send you that kind of email. Most of them have an address advertised on their websites for you to report these emails to, in both ebay and paypal's case it's spoof@ and the organisation name. Often that'll work for other organisations too. Copy the email into a new one as an attachment (so that they get all the message headers) and forward it to the spoof@ address.

HTH

Thanks for feed back , thats what i did last night sent ot on to Pay pal , and got a responce , straight away . Knew it looked fishy , but some others you never know . Good to keep our eyes open though and be reminded .