Paypal Users are Targeted by a New Phishing Scam

Security experts warned that, the users of PayPal should be careful from a scam email that is designed for installing malware on user's computer. As the appearance of this scam email does not have anything abnormal, so it is also effective like several other phishing scams. The malicious email is designed to appear like a communication received from PayPal. The email appears as if it has been sent from the address 'service@paypal.com' having a subject "PayPal account warning," hence drawing the attention of the user.

This malicious email comes along with a Word document as an attachment. Once the user opens the word document, the malware enters into the computer. The computer virus affects the Windows machines; however the users of Android, iPhone and Mac will not be impacted by this virus even after opening the malicious email.

As per My Online Security, the security blog, PayPal scam has several variations, currently active online. Some emails come along with a Word document, and some only a link to click on. The message contained can be an "account warning" or a payment notice, or a notification saying the account has been logged in from some other unknown device.

The malicious emails often appear having a valid email address and a subject, however the content of the email seems fake. To cite an example, the malicious email comes with the content like, "Greetings, dear Client! Please! We noticed a lot of frauds performed by machinations with online services of the accounts of our clients" at the beginning.

The choice of words, grammar and punctuations used to draft the content makes it prevalent that the message has not come from PayPal. Also, these malicious emails are sent to different addresses by keeping the recipients in CC and not in BCC, which indicates that the addresses are visible to all the recipients. PayPal never adopts such practice while sending emails to any of its users.

The security experts are asking people to be cautious of these fraudulent mails. If a user receives this type of suspicious emails with attachment or external website links, they should readily forward the same to spoof@paypal.com.

» SPAMfighter News - 8/14/2018