By Staff
April 22nd, 2018
BURLINGTON, ON
This one is particularly nasty.
It looked Ok.
It isn’t
You respond – and the process of sealing your identity begins.
Nasty because you think that a trusted service provider (even if the fees are a little on the steep side) is protecting you.
Dear Customer,
We just wanted to confirm that you’ve changed your password. If you didn’t make this change, please login to your PayPal account now.
It’s important that you let us know because it helps us prevent unauthorised persons from accessing the PayPal network and your account information.
Tips to help protect your password:
• Never share your password with anyone.
• Create passwords that are hard to guess and don’t use personal information. Be sure to include uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols.
• Use different passwords for each of your online accounts.
Yours sincerely – Pay Pal
When we saw the message we check our Pay Pal account – the log in and the password had not been changed. Remember – if in doubt – don’t. And when it comes to your financial affairs – doubt everything.
But the best protection is to never respond by clicking the links helpfully included in the note. Sign in to the service another way if you are concerned, or phone their customer service … But never dial a number contained in the message … It is likely phoney too!
Another protection for you is to read these notes carefully. Consider:”If you didn’t make this change, log in …” Hello? If your password was chaged, how would this be possible? Many phishing notes contain logical inconstencies like this.
Yet another protection is to read notes like this on a proper computer instead of your toy smartphone, so you can check out links in these phishing messages before clicking on them.
These messages from PayPal and other “financial” institutions are constantly ending up in my junk mail. I mark them all “phishing scams” and delete them–but they keep coming. QUESTIONS: why can’t the email providers simply block/delete these messages? It might make an interesting legal precedent to take legal action against these median companies for “abetting a fraud”.