2007-02-17

Web forgery, phishing alert


A few days ago I received an e-mail to my gmail account with the subject "Please restore your Online Paypal ..."
I immediately knew it was a spam, but I was more curious than afraid. Here is what it contained:

From: "PayPal" Reply-To: "PayPal"


Dear Customer,

As part of our security measures, we regularly screen activity in the PayPal system. We recently contacted you after noticing an issue on your account.We requested information from you for the following reason: .

Our system requires further account verification.

Case ID Number: PP-184-703-194

Be sure to log in securely by clicking this link. Once you log in, you will be provided with steps to restore your account access. We appreciate your understanding as we work to ensure account safety.

simply sign on from Account Services to Restore Your Account .

In accordance with PayPal's User Agreement, your account access will remain limited until the issue has been resolved. Unfortunately, if access to your account remains limited for an extended period of time, it may result in further limitations or eventual account closure. We encourage you to log in to your PayPal account as soon as possible to help avoid this.

To review your account and some or all of the information that PayPal used to make its decision to limit your account access, please visit the Resolution Center. If, after reviewing your account information, you seek further clarification regarding your account access, please contact PayPal by visiting the Help Center and clicking "Contact Us".

We thank you for your prompt attention to this matter. Please understand that this is a security measure intended to help protect you and your account. We apologize for any inconvenience.


Sincerely,

PayPal Account Review Department

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

PayPal Email ID PP638

The underlined text was a link to a site. Knowing that I have enough protection I opened the link because I was very curious how a phishing site may look like. I have never encountered such a thing.
So I opened the link in a new tab and this is why I love Mozilla a bit more than before:





I did not see any point in further research. I was amused by their ways of stealing my non existent Paypal account and I was satisfied with my ability to spot spam.

No comments: