FORGED EMAILS: Microsoft, PayPay, Yahoo, Ebay, IPIU, & Others

[John W Tuthill -]

I have two paypal accounts plus a paypal visa.
You also need to watch the clubs you join,we joined a well known video and dvd club and they passed our credit card number on th anotner business twice.Luckly the number to this other business was on the reciet,I called them and got my money back and found out who signed us up. Cancled that club with a few short words(i think they were french words)even though i don't speak it.

[Janet Normington]

Has anyone been receiving e-mails from a person supposed to be from Africa and related to a president or Prime Minister and are trying to send money to the US and want you to be their go between. I seem to remember a post in the past with e-mail addresses to send these to. Federal Government or someone like that. Does anyone have these??

Robert

You will find a lot more information about such e-mails under the forum entitled "More Nigeria Email 00000".

[Rachel Shefferly--]

Thank you for the heads up because i have yahoo email but i have not recieved that yet, but if i do i will know what to do.

[Diane Adele Pitts]

Hi All, I see we must be vigilant. On e-bay, I just felt uncomfortable handing over my credit card number to pay pal. I got in the habit of getting a money order right away and sending it. It makes one think that we we should go back to a cash society or just take money out of our own bank's ATM. I am rethinking using my credit card in restaurants. I may just get the money out ahead of time. If you think about it, even sending our checks to pay for items other than utilities or mortgage, gives others access to our checking account numbers. Maybe I should start paying with money orders!! Hmmmmmm Diane

[Larry J Catoe]

I recieved one of these e-mails about my ebay account and had to setup a new account due to the person who sent me the e-mail stealing my personal information. It was a big headache. Luckly they were not able to do anything with my information before I changed it. Please becareful with your information.

[Scott M Albright -]

There are so many things to reply to, so I thought I'd shoot out a summary:

1) You will always have people trying to steal your information. If you have signed-up for multiple websites vary your passwords, most people don't and that allows a hacker to jump right in. Make your passwords difficult and don't use words that are easily associated to you. The emails asking for personal information is a new catch phrase called "phishing," don't be caught.

2) Believe it or not the Internet is a safer place for electronic transactions than using a credit card in a local store, not as many hands on your information. I don't do online business with a company that doesn't have some form of security feature on their site - such as VeriSign.

3) John French is very right - if you get emails asking for personal information you should forward them to the associated company. Most major online companies (especially ones dealing with finances) have email addresses specifically to track this stuff. John mentioned emails about drug suppliers, etc.. get ready for tons of 0000 emails about helping tsunami victims.

100% of companies should have a policy of not asking you for your personal information unless YOU contact THEM. If they cannot adhere to that line of thinking take your business elsewhere.

4) The nice thing about PayPal is you DON'T have to keep money in there until YOU the buyer is making a purchase. I keep a $0 balance in my account and put the exact money in my account when I'm spending.

5) If you receive an email you think is suspicious trust your first instinct and don't jump on board with what it wants. The Internet is a valuable tool. Check websites like www.google.com, www.hoax.com, www.snopes.com - they'll direct you towards known 00000, etc..

[Aretha Caldwell -]

Thank you so much because I recieved a couple of these e-mails myself and my husband have recieved some but, if you recieve something that your not familiar with then I usually just deleted the entire file. And try to keep your e-mail for business only
that a way if your bank has sold your name to a third party I would send a complaint to the Bank or Credit Card company. But Great Advice

[Lori Copaus]

I have received false e-mails like that from ebay and paypal, I simply forwarded them to their spoof dept. and received an immediate response stating that they hadn't sent those. As far as cancelling your pp acct., is has it's pro's and cons. Pro's- alot of the agencies we work for prefer to pay through paypal. And Con is just alot of people are having money stolen from those accounts.

Lori E. Copaus
P. I . Trainee

[Terry Frampton]

I have received false e-mails like that from ebay and paypal, I simply forwarded them to their spoof dept. and received an immediate response stating that they hadn't sent those. As far as cancelling your pp acct., is has it's pro's and cons. Pro's- alot of the agencies we work for prefer to pay through paypal. And Con is just alot of people are having money stolen from those accounts.

Lori E. Copaus
P. I . Trainee

Lori. This is why I was hesitant to sign up for Paypal, but like you said a lot of agencies we work for prefer to pay through Paypal. I signed up for it with an account that I only keep a few dollars in. ;)

[Matthew Nicholas Eberhardt]

Did you have money sitting in your PayPal acct? I never leave money in mine. I thought they were secure? hmm I better ask them about that. I don't want my info stolen.

Paypal accounts would be more likely to be hacked into because Paypal deals with international commerce, and that sort of commerce just naturally has a higher percentage of con-artists, consipirators, etc.

In my experience, the best policy is to just put enough money in Paypal to take care of business, but not much more than that. When your money is in a bank, you have much more recourse legally if something goes wrong.

[Tonya Gilmore -]

I have gotten the one from eBay. When I clicked on the link it gave me my eBay toolbar popped up a warning that the site was a fake & gave me a link to report it to eBay. The emails do look very real, so ya'll be careful.

[Michael Harris]

To All:

I get about three of these every day - Monday through Friday. I have several email accounts and only two or three of them get the phishing emails.

The big offenders are eBay, PayPal, Washington Mutual, and Huntington Bank (the newest). The scariest thing is how good these phisihing email look and how close to the legitimate sites they look.

Since I do not deal with all the firms that get phished, I am not concerned about falling for one. I do dread the day when the bad guys get one that fools me.

[Cheyenne Wolf]

I also recieved an email supposedly from pay pal. Personally I like speaking to a human being so I looked them up on the net and made a phone call. The sweet gentleman I spoke with did inform me that they were aware of the problem and the email link had been disabled to prevent those who sent it from getting personal account information on its clients. I check my email everyday and they managed to detect and disable this fraudulent email before I recieved it in my box. Cudos to them for the diligence. Chey

[Cheyenne Wolf]

Thank you for all the intel. Oh and that word you used that came up zeros is a NO NO. I found out the hard way. So embarrassing Chey

[Cheyenne Wolf]

Terry thank you so much for that little bit of intel. Guess I may have to have a paypal account. I may use your strategy and let it hold as little money as humanly possible. Thank you very much for sharing... : Chey

[Cheyenne Wolf]

Thank you Larry Catoe. I as yet am not to familiar with ebay. I have an antique car that I bought when I was 19 many many years ago. Its value has appreciated greatly and was voted #1 muscle car several times. Though I hate to think of parting with my 70 ss 454, I was considering putting it up on ebay and startin the bids at its estimated value of 27k. To me it sounds like ebay may be easier to crack. With that in mind I may consider other avenues if I decide to sell her. Thank you so much for sharing your experience Chey

[Cheyenne Wolf]

To Jan, I didn't have that long of a wait but I made my call later in the evening. I called about 8 in the evening central standard time. I guess call volumes are lower later in the evening. If you have to call ever again try earlier in the morning or later in the evening. Most companies have CSR's available until late in the evening to help you. Later in the evening = less call volume and a shorter wait. Hope this helps anyone who reads it.

[Robert G Allen]

Ok...listen to this....

I get these emails all the time. Any time you get an email asking for personal info, DON'T GIVE IT!!! And above all, DON'T click on the links. Reputable companies will not email you to confirm your account info. So, no matter how real it looks, don't click on the links and don't give any info. Go DIRECTLY (not through the link) to the web site of the company you have the account with. Forward the email to them and ask them if it is real. You will get a reply that says it is not.

I have reported to E-Bay, PayPal and numerous banks that I have received these emails.

In fact, you can be assured that almost any email you get requesting personal information is a 0000. I would like to get into an area of investigation that would expose who the people are that put these emails out, but I don't know if that is an area we can get involved in.

Bob Allen

[Kurk Petterson-]

The best situation is when you receive an email about your ebay account... and you don't even have an account with that email address.

You know at that point that it's a mass email that several people are receiving regardless if they have an account or not.

Like everyone else has said, stay on your toes when acting on suspicious emails.

Thanks for the thread.

[Gail Zito]

I got one of these yahoo 00000 and when I got to the part where it asked for my bank card code I realized it wasn't real cuz Yahoo would not ask for that. So I immediately clicked on the X to close the window and even logged off internet just in case. Whew! close call. That was about 4 months ago. Yesterday I got one that said "Yahoo Billing" and when I opened it , it had a wierd scarey message like "7m ..." I learned after that first one to log on directly and don't ever click on links mainly from your emails. On the other hand I also got someone that just decided to charge my debit credit card and I didn't even know who they were. Something called "My Real Estate Mentor" for $29.95. I had to get a new debit card and sign a letter and fax it to my bank to have them investigate. I got my money back! Tina

I also received a fake email from Yahoo asking me for my bank card plus my pin/ATM number. I saved it and went into the official Yahoo site to the security section, found the email address to send the fake message too and sent it immediately. No company should ever ask for your personal info by email; only if you are ordering stuff from the web should you give out this information and always make sure there is the secure/safety icon usually on the bottom right hand side that looks like a padlock. So many people are fooled by the stolen logos and they get terribly ripped off.

Gail Zito

[Carl Oaklund]

Thanks for the warning, I have received many of these and have deleted all.

[Marsha Waters Fisher -]

Thanks so much for this information! I just received an email from AOL asking to update my account information. They needed a new debit or credit card number. I forwarded it to AOL and it was indeed fraudulent!

[Ralston Taylor]

I recently received a PayPal Update email. Since when did Paypal ask for the ATM Pin# ?

Ralston Taylor

[Ralston Taylor]

I received an update by or suspend one week ago. I opened the link, but stopped after seeing the field for atm#. I then clicked on the question link, which brought me to a PayPal webform where I questioned this. A few days later I received a response to the question webform and told to call PP. Before I called them yesterday, I had already received an opinion survey on how my complaint was handled over the phone, before I actually made the call.
I still have the email, in which I want to forward to the proper people. Where should I send this letter?

Ralston Taylor

[Ralston Taylor]

Hello All.... I thought it would be informal to include my letter. FYI

Dear valued PayPal® member:



It has come to our attention that your PayPal® account information needs to be
updated as part of our continuing commitment to protect your account and to
reduce the instance of fraud on our website. If you could please take 5-10 minutes
out of your online experience and update your personal records you will not run into
any future problems with the online service.


However, failure to update your records will result in account suspension.
Please update your records on or before April 30, 2005.

Once you have updated your account records, your PayPal® session will not be
interrupted and will continue as normal.

To update your PayPal® records click on the following link:
http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run



Thank You.
PayPal® UPDATE TEAM

Accounts Management As outlined in our User Agreement, PayPal® will
periodically send you information about site changes and enhancements.

Visit our Privacy Policy and User Agreement if you have any questions.
http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr...rivacy-outside



Ralston Taylor

[Garry VanCamp -]

Thanks for the information.
Regards,
Garry VanCamp

[Stacey Lawalin]

Thanks for the warning! I deal with these sites a lot, so this is valuable info to be aware of.

[Tamara Bell]

I work for a hugh bank currently and all the information provided her is correct and true. Allways check or goto the website of the company yourself and through the website you can contact their tech. support for verification and in some cases they will ask you to forward the e-mail to them. These companies will never ask you to re verify your information a second time they already have it on file. It almost happened to me on e-bay, (I got a fishing e-mail), good thing I just read the securities area in pay-pal and i ent them the e-mail and it was fraud. I can say that working for a bank and seeing customers daily going through identity fraud, is a very sad thing for the person. So PI's keep a look out and question everything......... , No ? is a silly ?......

[Jim Johnson--]

Hello All,
Intresting enough I received such an e-mail asking me to up date my information.
After checking with ebay's Trust and Security Dept. they assured me it was fraudulant.

[Nicole Marlin -]

I have received several of these emails myself. When I received the first one I was rather alarmed. I did not click on any links. I went to my account first to check on things. If you receive these emails send them to spoof@paypal.com and they will investigate the matter further. Hope this helps.

[Jackie R Rutherford]

Technical Support,Thanks for the valuable infomation.

[Donald Bowen]

I have something I'd like to add to this! Everyone should check their outgoing emails as well as incoming! Recently I had EBay and PayPal close down my accounts. I had any messages with my email address being used as "the sender" copied and sent back to me as a received message. One morning I found 11 emails that I allegedly sent out to other people asking if they received my offer. I never sent them!

After the accounts were suspended and all the information changed, I had them both reopened. EBay still has not told me if they found out where the originator was! This makes it difficult when you know you didn't originate the emails and yet you are credited with sending them.

[Cheryl Bliton]

WOW, I wish I had this information before. But I did realize that this was a fraud, esp if you don't you the paypal (which I didn't). I just feel really sorry for the older generation.

[Dianne Riker -]

It is funny that the original posting on the subject was back in 2004 because I just recently received an email from whomever regarding my PayPal account. I had a problem with this particular email and wrote directly to paypal to find out if the email I received was legit. It wasn't, as a matter of fact according to PayPal it contained a virus. Be Smart all and pay attention to anything you receive, be it ebay or paypal. What a world we live in. Take care all.

[Donald Bowen]

Don't just think that older folks are getting ripped off. A friend is under 20 and she was taken for more than a few hundred. Just out of high school and to think, she is just getting started as an adult. I'm thankful she has a lot of family supporting her. She took some advice to get better protected and now has a family member (and me) to help her with her future internet transactions.

She also received a virus with her originally received email. I don't know which one it was but it took three days to clean it out of her computer!

I wish all people with computers at least get some free software available almost everywhere to clean their computers of the spyware and fraud information they don't even see being loaded into their computers.

[Maday Llerena]

I'm glad you are sharing all this valuable information here in this forum because I just ordered a couple of items from e-bay and I payed with my credit card. Now I know to be careful, thanks!

[Cynthia Wilson]

Hello,

I just wanted to let everyone know that I received two e-mails in my junk mail at yahoo in the last couple of days, from what I thought was IPIU. When I transferred them to my inbox and opened them, there was nothing but garble on them. I was concerned that there were virus's attached so I deleted them rather than copy them, to show here. I did not want to take a chance of bringing the virus, if there was any, to IPIU.

Please be aware of this, and be careful if you find IPIU e-mails in your junk box. They may not be from IPIU. They had a rather omonious sound to them, which is why I opened them, I thought I was loosing my IPIU status or something. Which is why I opened the e-mails.

If anyone has received the e mails as well through yahoo.com mail, or can advise me as to the ones that I received, I would really appreciate that.

[Donald Bowen]

Well Maday, I hope no one thinks I'm downing the use of internet commerce. I'm not really. I just want people to continue to be aware. The downtime I experienced comes to something good if it helps to keep others from getting bad information or viruses.

This tells me that good came from a somewhat bad experience! Keep going with it! This is positive and good when everyone keeps their focus on it.

[David Copeland]

Hello,

I just wanted to let everyone know that I received two e-mails in my junk mail at yahoo in the last couple of days, from what I thought was IPIU. When I transferred them to my inbox and opened them, there was nothing but garble on them. I was concerned that there were virus's attached so I deleted them rather than copy them, to show here. I did not want to take a chance of bringing the virus, if there was any, to IPIU.

Please be aware of this, and be careful if you find IPIU e-mails in your junk box. They may not be from IPIU. They had a rather omonious sound to them, which is why I opened them, I thought I was loosing my IPIU status or something. Which is why I opened the e-mails.

If anyone has received the e mails as well through yahoo.com mail, or can advise me as to the ones that I received, I would really appreciate that.

Thank you Cynthia for notifying us that there are some forged IPIU emails floating around.

We have updated this topic on Page 1, Post 1 to include IPIU along with Yahoo,, Ebay, Paypal, and other international websites that have had some of their customers receive phony forged emails that contain "attachments".

For the record, IPIU NEVER emails any attachments because of potentail virus'.

Here is acopy of our latest bulletin:

---

Warning, you may be receiving forged emails stating your accounts have been suspended, cancelled, or need verification. These emails LOOK OFFICIAL, but they are not.

IPIU emails do NOT contain any Attachments. We do NOT ask you to open an Attachement in the email or to "colick" on an Attachment. At most, we will email some members web links to our forum site, but again - we do NOT email any Attachments.

If IPIU emails you a web link, place the mouse oover the link WITHOUT CLICKING ON IT and see if it is located somewhere at our root web sites, such as www.ipiu.org , www.ipiu.org/forums, or our ecommerce site at www.privateinvestigators.cc

If you want to verify if your account has been cancelled or suspended, then LOG IN AT THE REGULAR ACCOUNT SITE ONLY. (Or, if it is related to IPIU - then privately email usa@ipiu.org to verify)

To read more, go to our Technical Support Forum and look for the interactive topic regarding FORGED EMAILS.

Or, copy and paste the following link into a new browser:

http://www.ipiu.org/forums/showthread.php?t=25183

[Michele R. Schibi--]

Thanks for the information. Michele