The bottom of the notification lists a number or tells you to go online. The bad guys had piggybacked on the system to make it look like an official billing notice from PayPal. The genius of this scam is that they had used this legitimate tool - an invoicing system - to lure users into revealing their passwords. It turns out any PayPal user can send another PayPal user an invoice. Had someone accessed my account? Did I need to file a report?Īfter a brief wait, a real PayPal representative answered all of my questions. I called PayPal to find out what was happening. Then he would have asked me to log in to my PayPal account.Īfter that, he would have harvested my password and helped himself to the money in my account, which he would have found disappointing because there’s nothing there. He would have asked me to download an app that records my keystrokes. The “representative” would have agreed that this was a scam and said I had a computer security problem. Here’s what would have happened if I had stayed on the phone. I could hear background noise - cars and people talking. “Hello, this is PayPal,” he said in a foreign accent. I dialed the redacted phone number instead of looking up the PayPal number online (after all, the email came from PayPal, so why wouldn’t I?) So the invoice is showing up in my PayPal account.
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