Online Scams - Don't Fall For Them!Over $1 Billion were handed over to online scammers in 2010. It's an extraordinary amount, that's hard to even imagine! The other day, I received a fraudulent email from someone posing as PayPal. Since you all have PayPal accounts, I thought it necessary to share this with you, along with general advice on how to pick a scam email, from a real one.Here's a screenshot of the email I received:  Lets take a closer look. The first thing you should look for is what email address it has been sent from. In this case it's from security{at}onlineupdate{dot}com, not a PayPal email address - (interestingly, this email is getting marked as SPAM when formatting that email address properly). This should send alarm bells instantly. And, check this out: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=security%40onlineupdate.com. A Google search on that email address returns scam after scam. The email address can sometimes be cloaked as well, so if that's the case the next thing you want to do is hover your mouse over the link to see what destination it's actually going to. When hovering over this link to a supposed PayPal.com, it showed this (see screenshot below).  The third tell in this particular email is incorrect grammar and a misspelled word. However a professional scammer wouldn't make this mistake. I'm not game enough to click on the link, but likely it would be a site that looks just like PayPal and you would log in, and they would capture your login info. They would then use your login details to go to the real PayPal account and withdrawal all your money! Here's so great info from PayPal on the matter:  This information is priceless, make sure you pass it on! Hopefully it will save someone a lot of heartache. You can never be too careful when selling online! Have a wonderful day and be safe! Jonathan Peacock CEO, Zibbet.com | ||||
Here's an example of a PayPal scam email:
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