World's Dumbest...

[dave87]

...scammers:

Dear PayPal Customer ,

This is your final warning about the safety of your PayPal account. If you do not update your billing informations your access on PayPal features will be restricted and the user deleted. This might be due to either following reasons:


- A recent change in your personal information (i.e. change of address)
- Submiting invalid information during the initial sign up process.
- An inability to accurately verify your selected option of payment due an internal error within
our processors.



Please update your PayPal profile in order to restore your online access:


[url]http://gw.pivdenny.dp.ua/icons/www.paypal.com/managament/cgi/[.url]


If your account information is not updated, your ability to use your PayPal account will become restricted.


Thank you,
PayPal Billing Department


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Its almost as if it is straight out of fonejacker

Note the bold bits - they contradict themselves in the single email they've sent me. If you are going to actually try to scam me out of money, at least make it vaguely believable.

That and the web address, and whilst it includes paypal.com, it fails to have it at the start where a naive user might actually believe that is where they are being directed.

Ah well, laugh and move on, but the first time I've seen one so blatantly erroneous...

[TooNice]

I've seen worse... [they don't normally get past the spam filter though]

[Stringent]

There are fraudulent PayPal emails going round?! Since when?!






Slight sarcasm intended.

[santa claus]

Mebbe pointing out where they are going wrong isn't helpful. The scammers may never be smart enough to catch out the literate but let's not help them improve their chances with other decent people who work for their pay.

[SiM]

Firefox gives a forgery warning when it tries to load it... but I couldn't load it anyway... I usually like to leave nice messages in the username and password fields for these scum...

[dave87]

Heh, Sarcastic messages well deserved I admit, but this one somehow got round GMail's usually excellent spam detection. At a glance it does look legit...ish...

[Betty_Swallocks]

It astonishes me that anybody in the world who is sufficiently up to date to have internet access isn't wise to these scams by now.

How could anybody be so stupid to fall for it?

Even if it was written properly surely everyone knows of these things.

Presumably they must still work at some level for them to still be doing it.

[idimmu]

the ones i get are the ones from "banks".. funny really, i get several a day from several different "banks"

wish i actually had that many different bank accounts, then i might have some money!

[Stringent]

Hello sir, I am calling from your bank ...

[idimmu]

yes id be happy to give you my details and let you siphon away my cash!

[funkydim]

when I used to work for a bank a client of mine came in with a letter. Something along the lines of 'I am King Abdullah of some Middle Eastern Country and need to use your bank account to deposit £50 million...please send me you account details'

So obviously a scam and quite funny i thought. However, my client was incredibly secretive about it and didnt beleive that this could be fake. (he was pretty old and didnt recieve many emails, so this was something new to him)
It took some convincing to talk him out of it.

[ryandeean]

what spam filters do you use to stop this crap?

[santa claus]

Originally Posted by funkydim

when I used to work for a bank a client of mine came in with a letter. Something along the lines of 'I am King Abdullah of some Middle Eastern Country and need to use your bank account to deposit £50 million...please send me you account details'

So obviously a scam and quite funny i thought. However, my client was incredibly secretive about it and didnt beleive that this could be fake. (he was pretty old and didnt recieve many emails, so this was something new to him)
It took some convincing to talk him out of it.

Seriously, this does worry me. There are vulnerable people who take things at face value because they are either naive or simply very trusting. It wouldn't be too hard to produce a more convincing scam with use of proper grammar and more plausible graphics. The scams are easy to spot for now but they will get more sophisticated. Personally speaking, I wouldn't want to help these people steal from decent people.

[JIM_BOB7813]

The scammers know nobody reads the footer of the email anyway.

[Rave]

I used to run the Lad Vampire overnight when my computer was on anyway crunching. Surely someone who can program can create a program to flood their fake website with thousands of spurious names and made up numbers?

[chicken]

Originally Posted by Rave

I used to run the Lad Vampire overnight when my computer was on anyway crunching. Surely someone who can program can create a program to flood their fake website with thousands of spurious names and made up numbers?

Good idea! I guess this hasn't been done so far because there's not enough drive on the defense side yet, most people just ignore them, but there must be a bored programmer somewhere who would take it on as a project.