21 September 2006 | Author: Mike Hanna

PayPal spam

How annoying is PayPal spam!

Personally, most of the PayPal emails I receive are dodgy spam emails that I should delete straight away, but if I receive a legitimate email from PayPal I'm not sure if it's actually genuine or not. Spammers are so proficient nowadays that they can send you an incredibly genuine-looking PayPal email that looks like it has been sent from a PayPal email address, so that the emails you receive look totally authentic.

The tactic that these email spammers use is called phishing and it is a particularly nasty thing to have happen to you. Phishing can happen when you visit a spam website, or through the receipt of these spammy emails. The set-up is simple: the spammer will first ask you to enter your financial details under false pretences, or sneakily access them from your computer and use these details to rob you of everything they can get.

Phishing may be among the worst of online crimes, but there are ways of fighting it. Our good friend Google has an anti-phishing feature built into the Google toolbar. This feature will prevent you from inadvertently visiting a phishing spam site and handing over your personal details to an unethical spam abuser. What happens is that if you visit one of these sites and the site attempts to access files on your computer, Google will send you a message informing you that this site is trying to access your computer and blocks this from happening. The only time this doesn't occur is if you are aware of what the site is, and why they are trying to access your computer; only then can you allow access.

With so many anti-spam companies out there fighting the good fight against spam you would think that PayPal would be doing as much as they could to try to prevent these fraudulent emails; yet people like me get PayPal spam emails every day.

So what exactly is PayPal doing about this spam abuse? Well there is a handy little piece of knowledge that PayPal have provided to help you fight the Pay Pal spam, to make sure it doesn't suck you in. I'm speaking of the email addresses spoof@paypal. com and spoof@paypal. co. uk. These email addresses are genuine PayPal email addresses; if you forward a PayPal email that you think may be spam to one of these addresses, you should receive a reply telling you whether the dubious email was indeed from PayPal, or just another piece of spam.

This morning, for instance, I was totally undecided about a PayPal email that I received It had the PayPal logo; it looked professional and official; it had a PayPal disclaimer at the bottom, and even warned me to watch out for fraudulent emails pretending that they were from PayPal. In my line of business, if you're unsure about something, you check it. I forwarded my email to spoof@paypal. com and within five minutes I got a reply informing me that the email was, as I had suspected, a fake.

PayPal is a great service on the internet - you just have to be very careful you don't get conned by an imitation.

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