For the past few weeks, my secondary email account has been harassed repeatedly by phishing Paypal emails. Almost all of such fake Paypal emails have the same urgent request; they would like me to log into my Paypal account using a link provided in the email, or else I would risk having my account deleted by Paypal. These emails, of course, are not really from Paypal.
I just got a similar email, a snapshot of which is posted below. As you can see from the image, the main login link points to an ip address directly, instead of the main Paypal.com website. Interestingly, all the other links in the email pointed to the real Paypal site. Some people can easily hover over a few links in the email and see that the links point to the real Paypal website, and may click the actual phishing link and assume, without looking, that it’s also a link to the real Paypal site. Whether this is the intended effect of the phishers, or simply a mistake, I’m not sure.
One easy way to recognize such a fake email is by simply moving your mouse over the actual link that you’re being told to click on. That should show you the actual link that you will be taken to, either through a small text right next to your mouse cursor [as shown in the picture above, in which I'm viewing the email using Microsoft Outlook], or in your status bar [the bar at the bottom of your browser]. The best way to safely perform any action online is to open a browser window yourself, type in the address of the website in question manually, and perform the action right there, instead of clicking a link in an email, unless you’re 100% sure it’s a legitimate email.
If only the people who’re sending me these emails could upgrade their systems to keep a track of who they’re spamming, they would know by now that I haven’t clicked any such link so far, and thus hopefully never will. Maybe then they would stop emailing me. I wonder if they’re waiting for the night I get drunk, so I would go on a clicking spree and log into all of my online account repeatedly until the alcohol saturation goes below 90%. Hmmm.
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