I DON’T want to sound like an expert online money-maker with this post. I’d just like to warn some bloggers who have PayPal accounts that online phishers are at work. And I’d like to reveal their scheme here.

I received an email with subject “Remove Limitation” from someone who disguises himself as a representative of PayPal. The email looked official. If you are not careful enough, you would believe it’s the real thing. Here are some screenshots:

The Phisher’s Email

I highlighted the parts that I found dubious. PayPal has always addressed me by my real name and not just as any account holder. I am also receiving emails from service@intl.paypal.com. That spelled the difference. Here’s a screenshot:

The Official Email from PayPal

If you read through the email, the phisher would try to convince you that somebody is trying to access your account and that to protect your account, PayPal has limited access to you account. To lift the limitation, a link is provided in the body of the email that leads to a site that would really look like PayPal’s until you take a look at the url.

The Phisher’s Site

The Real PayPal Site

Take note that PayPal is a secure site; it uses https:// and not just http://. So, if you are a careful customer, surely you wouldn’t give away personal information via a non-secure site and allow crawlers to fetch your info and run away with your hard-earned money.

Because I was sure that the site is not real, I logged in using a wrong password and voila, it didn’t know that my password was wrong! I was pseudo-logged in and was prompted to enter information including my ATM PIN.

If you are in your proper state of mind, you should never divulge your PIN to anyone.

That’s all. I hope this helped.