A while back I received an email that was supposedly from PayPal, it wasn’t of course, and it was pretty easy to discern the fact that it was an identity thief trying to take advantage of unsuspecting users. The methods used can still be seen today if you just look in your Inbox or browse many newsgroups. Those messages that masquerade around as helpful MS Support emails. But what about the laymen, what about my Mom? To the average user, there’s no easy way to tell these are fake. With these PayPal, eBay, and Amazon emails they often ask for a persons full name, address, social security number, credit card, and even PIN number. That is a dead giveaway right there isn’t it? Well sure, but what about your grandfather who just happens to be going a little senile. They may not realize a company would never ask for your PIN but then again they may just enter it anyway. Then when they go to submit to submit the info they may not realize it goes to some obfuscated URL, maybe because at least one part of it includes ebay in plain text? Something has to be done to protect the innocent users from these sort of emails. Microsoft has posted the page about “How to tell if it’s authentic”. Yet even though I’ve sent the three other emails to PayPal, eBay, and Amazon, I have yet to see any major warning on their site, that’s just plain despicable. In any case, here’s a copy of the email I received on Wednesday at 12:01PM, Outlook 2003 automatically dropped it in Junk E-mail which is nice. The image was attached but Outlook displayed it in the contents like a normal plain text email. It also pretended to be from eBay [supportdep21@eBay.com]; on behalf of; eBay [supportdep71@eBay.com], requesting the user “Please update your e-Bay account information”.

Oh yeah, please copy the shortcut rather than directly clicking on the image, I prefer not to show up as a big referrer in this guys logs:

In case you want to check out the original message, here’s a link. I just hope that I’ve got at least one reader at eBay, PayPal, and Amazon that will make sure some notice is put up on their site to help notify users of this problem.

Tags: Rants