Examples of Suspected Fraud or Fake Emails

[PayPal_Andy]

Hey Everybody!

In an effort to make things easier to find and research, I'm going to consolidate as many threads as possible where we have examples of people trying to defraud hard working sellers (Craigslist emails, 'PayPal' emails asking you to send money outside of PayPal, etc).  This will also be used as a master thread for future posts regarding this same situation.

When you post your examples here, please remember to not include last names or contact information of whoever is sending these emails.  There's no way to confirm if that person has been defrauded as well and the name is being used fraudulently.

Thanks for your cooperation and remember, keep the conversation productive, on task, and above all, keep it clean. I know these things can be difficult and frustrating, but bleep filled posts or posts that look like government redacted files will never benefit anyone. 😄

Andy

[sharpiemarker]

Perhaps PayPal email system has a way of removing email content with harmful docs or coding in them prior to receiving and it comes up blank.

[bestspectre]

That doesn't make sense. They want you to send them phishing emails so they can analyze them to stop further phishing. Why would they have software to filter out the content? Wouldn't that mean there is no need to forward phishing emails because thay won't or can't do anything with them?

[DPCreations]

They have very good reason to remove malicious attachments from incoming mail as they need to keep their internal systems secure.

Make sure any messages forwarded do no contain malicious attachments.  You can use your own anti-virus programs to scan attachments.

[bestspectre]

Don't buy that. There is no attachment only links, to God only knows, similar to all other phishing emails I have forwarded before and that have been confirmed as phishing. If your assertion were accurate, why wouldn't they say so, "we can't analyze your email because of X, Y, or Z" instead of letting someone else's Hypotheses be their excuse for not doing their job of protecting us, their clients. I forwarded the email to myself to see if it deleted it's content if forwarded and I got the complete email. They need to accept their responsibility to protect their client. It could contain contain a key that would delete it's content if forwarded to Spoof@paypal.com. I would be very concerned about that. If all this is filtered by software it should have an alert for a person to examine what is received and call or provide another email address to forward it to that would not trigger the deletion. Which is possible because I did forward it to myself and received the entire body of the email.

[bestspectre]

I thought that was the reason they wanted us to forward supiscious emails. So they could analyze the codings and links and shut them down before we, their client, were harmed.

[DPCreations]

Looking at the first message my guess would be that the content of the email was removed BEFORE it got to PayPal.

The header information from your sent email would give a little information about the sent email such as being sent as text format, but it won't show the route to the recipient.

You could try another test and send the email to yourself making sure you use the email service on one device and then receive with a different service on a different device.  The idea would be to make it leave your email world, travel to the external email world and then back to yours.  Then check the email header for more infomation.

You could also phone PayPal support for help, but will take a lot of patience and persistence.

[akailiajade]

I tried to do this and also BCC my Evernote address so I'd have a copy to refer to if I needed it. It absolutely did NOT go to my Evernote account at all, despite three or four attempts. So now I'm not sure if it ever went to the spoof address either.

[noerosvang]

hi!, today i recieved a paypal mail about statement of unexpected sign in activity (the sender is not paypal domain) but when i login directly in the website i dont have any alert about this so i suppose that mail is phising, can you verify please?, than you.

[kernowlass]

@noerosvang

I can tell its a spoof from the first 2 words.

Paypal would never address you as Dear Member, they would use your full name eg Dear John Smith.

They would also not ask you to click on an unsafe link in an email, they would tell you to log on normally and go to the resolution centre or message centre.

NEVER CLICK ON ANY LINKS IN EMAILS...VERY UNSAFE.

I get emails like that every few weeks, just ignore and delete.

[Whac-A-Mole]

all Paypal emails ends with

@ paypal.com

when in doubt,forward to spoof@paypal.com,it will tell y ou