Wednesday 6 July 2011

Fraud

I find some of the scams becoming increasingly convincing.

Here's not a very good example :

In an email coming in as:

    From:     PayPal
    Subject:     Important Please Read
    Date:     6 July 2011 09:52:20 GMT+01:00


Dear valued PayPaI« Customer,

We need your help resolving an issue with your account. To give us time to work together on this, we've temporarily limited what you can do with your account until the issue is resolved.

What's the problem?

We noticed some unusual activity on the credit card linked to your PayPaI« account.

Case ID Number: PP-001-212-055-698

How you can help

It's usually pretty easy to take care of things like this. Most of the time, we just need a little more information about your account.

To help us with this and to find out what you can and can't do with your account until the issue is resolved, please proceed to our secure webform by clicking here.

Thanks,
PayPaI«

When the "clicking here" leads to an address other than Paypal which makes it easy to spot.

In practice I never respond to any request no matter how convincing but choose to initiate the whole process of contacting myself - that is if I think there may be a problem.

5 comments:

lakeuk said...

Have you had the phone scam yet, I got the call on Saturday and had abit of fun with it.

Wrote about it and posted a couple of recording I made on my blog http://lakeuk.blogspot.com

Geoff Dellow said...

Good fun Dave - I had a listen.

I've never had this kind of scam but then I've registered to block cold calling.

lakeuk said...

Having registered for a block won't help with these type of calls.

These guys operate off shore in India and have no care for any UK law - if they've manage to get hold of a name & number then that's all they need - sadly alot of companies are happy to sell this type of information

Hopefully with me wasting there time if they have any sense then they'd have flagged my number as not worth the hassle of calling again

Anonymous said...

I say I am very interested and ask them to hold I then place phone near a music source when I pick it up after about 15mins they are gone

Gladys Hobson said...

I get those emails all the time. Plus those that offer the rags to riches pitch! Oh Yes, and it seems I have become a millionaire overnight!