Phishing Emails

Recently, I've received at least 2 emails, coming from a source which claimed to be PayPal. The contents of the email was as such (words underlined and highlighted in blue were originally links to the so-called "PayPal" site, but had been removed by me for security reasons):

Unauthorized access to your PayPal account!

We recently noticed more attempts to log in to your PayPal account from a foreign IP address.

If you accessed your account while traveling, the unusual log in attempts may have been initiated by you. However, if you are the rightfull holder of the account, please visit Paypal as soon as possible to verify your identity:
Click here to verify your account

You can also verify your account by logging into your PayPal account at https://www.paypal.com/us/.

If you choose to ignore our request, you leave us no choise but to temporaly suspend your account.

We ask that you allow at least 72 hours for the case to be investigated and we strongly recommend to verify your account in that time. Thank you for using PayPal!

The PayPal Team

Please do not reply to this email. This mailbox is not monitored and you will not receive a response. For assistance, log in to your PayPal account and choose the Help link located in the top right corner of any PayPal page.To receive email notifications in plain text instead of HTML, update your preferences here

PayPal Email ID PP468

In this email, this source even used the PayPal logo and slogan from the original PayPal site, and also used "paypal.com" as their email domain. However, what gave them away was the URL of the links, which were pointed to "nakat.auc.co.jp/..." For all I know, PayPal does not have any other domain names, so this is obviously a fraud, and I immediately dropped a note to PayPal. Whether or not they'd be investigating this case, I'm not sure, but I feel that I should at least let them know that there's (yet) another crimminal organisation trying to impersonate them.

So people out there, if you're a user of PayPal, or even any websites which involves online payment, no matter if you're a regular user or not, please be cautious of such emails! For more information about phishing and how to fight against it, please visit PayPal's guide to phishing. Do not allow yourself to fall prey for despicable crimminal organisations trying to cash in on innocent folks like you and me!