Paypal Gone Phishing - Biggest Phishing Scam Of 2006

Over the last few years pc users have become much more aware of spyware issues, Windows Xp has also gotten better at keeping users protected from unwanted adware and spyware. However, one problematic security issue has become “phishing scams”.

What Is Phishing?

From Google: Phishing comes from the analogy that internet scammers are using email bait to fish for passwords and financial data from the sea of internet users. Since hackers have a tendency of replacing “f” with “ph”, the term phishing was derived. The term has evolved over the years to include not only obtaining user account details but access to all personal and financial data.

Last year one of the biggest scams was the Paypal scam in which users would receive an email saying “a new authorized email address has been added to your pay pal account, please login and verify this address”.

Unsuspecting paypal members would then login to the fake paypal website, logging in however then gives the scammers your paypal username and password. Working and playing online as much as I do I must have seen this “scam” email at least two hundred times.

Often times the easiest way to spot a scam is by simply looking at the website address. Since the scammers have to create a website on a “fake” website address or domain name usually these scams are easy to spot.

Also understand that Paypal will never email you asking you to login after “another verified or authorized email address has been added”.

In 2007 phishing scams are expected to continue, stay safe and watch which sites your loging in and out of.