Dangerous paypal emails

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: WEP

Well, I've just been introduced to spybot. It took over an hour to scan my system before I could even log back on or do anything at all. I sure hope it isn't that way every time because if it is I will just have to set it to run when I call it and at no other time.

I read a whole big book while it was setting up and loading and checking. And all it found was Windows media player which I don't have the foggiest idea why it hates that program so much.
I'm sure one of you folks can educate me to that so please feel free to do so.

It did also find something else to holler about which was "new" something or other and only affects explorer and I hardly use that brain dead piece of crap unless I absolutely have to for some reason.

Funny thing too is that ad aware didn't complain a bit about spybot.

Oh well, I have been wanting to read that book anyway and never found the time to do it. Problem was that what I had hoped would be a good book turned out to be a bunch of crap too.

(LOL)

 

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: WEP

I've never heard of Ifranview. Tell me a bit about it please.

I sure wish there was something as good as spybot to get rid of all the porn crap I get. Its not that I'm so much against the porn but rather I don't have time for it.

If I was to let myself get off into looking at all that pretty stuff I'd never get anything done. (LOL)

 

I was right. It is a bogus email.

I was right in the first place. That was a bogus email from paypal.

I trusted the person who posted claiming that they loved their job and they knew it was a real email from paypal so I went ahead and clicked on the link given last night.

I don't know if anything bad will happen yet and they didn't ask for any personal information or any information that would compromise my account. They just wanted to know if one of the emails I have listed with PayPals was correct or not.

But I also have emails that PayPal don't know anything about and for which I would have no reason to give them and I got the same email in 3 of them this morning including one email addy I have that is on hotmail that I use to subscribe to junk mail when I do search engine and FFA page submissions. The way I have it set up is that when I do FFA and other junk submissions I use an email address that is an autoresponder.

The autoresponder gets hit by all the thank you emails that come back each time you submit somewhere and those are set up basically to harvest emails which are later sold to anybody who wants to buy their list so they can then send out tons of spam. Each time the autoresponder gets hit it starts sending out an email once each week for 52 weeks to each email addy it gets hit with. Send an email to it and you will get an email from it fot the next 52 weeks. And each of those emails carries the hotmail addy and I scan those emails to see what's interesting and delete all of them. I might actually read maybe 2 or 3 emails a day some days out of the hotmail addy.

This morning there were 5 emails in there from PayPal and all of them exactly alike. The same one I posted up here.

Now then, that could only lead to the conclusion that if the email I posted here was genuine then PayPal has suddenly started an active email harvesting program to attract more customers and I seriously doubt that any major corporation in the banking industry is going to stoop to harvesting emails. They got better things to do in the first place and if they actually had done that they would hurt themselves far more than they would do any good.

They just aren't that stupid.

So the email is bogus. There is no other conclusion I can draw based on the evidence I now have. Most likely it is somebody that hates PayPal so bad that they set it up to go to an actual paypal page in order to hopefully cause PayPal as much grief as they possibly could by flooding their system with millions of people actually going to their site and confirming their email addresses that it could shut paypal's servers down. Or at least hopefully so.

Almost like a dos (denial of service) attack.

I'd be willing to bet that is why the email is being sent out because it simply can't be coming from paypal themselves.

 

I was right. It is a bogus email.

I'd switch to netscape or one of the other better email & browsers programs first of all and then get the spybot thing and maybe some of the Norton Utilities.

 

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: WEP

I just get a page not found error out of the link you posted.

 

Well the link you posted ---

Yes, it did that for me too. But can you imagine the impact on PayPal's servers if even a few hundred thousand people clicked on those emails? They have some huge number of millions of customers according to them. Something like 34 million accounts if I remember correctly.

I've received at least half a dozen more emails exactly the same as the first one just today alone.

Who and why would anybody do that? Well, I may be wrong but I'm going to take a guess. There are untold numbers of people out there involved in all kinds of multi-level marketing schemes and have tried to use PayPal to pay their downlines. Most people who get into those marketing schemes make very little money. Most internet marketers make less than $100 a month. That can mean that paypal has to do a ton of bookwork they would not have to do. On top of that, Visa and Mastercard don't like MLM because they get tons of complaints about merchandise not delivered and all kinds of things.

So a new internet bank like PayPal has now opened up called "Storm Pay" and they promise not to shut people's accounts down no matter what except by court order. I've had lots of emails from marketters telling people about various schemes to shut PayPal down or get even with them for the shabby way PayPal has treated them.

PayPal will shut somebody down that don't treat their customers right and resolve all customer disputes immediately. Storm Pay promises not to shut anybody down without a court order no matter what.

Seems to me that very well might be where this is coming from.

Yes, they send people by the thousands or maybe even by the millions to PayPals email confirmation web page and yes, because of the fact that paypal has a cookie on each of their customer's computers so they can be recognized their correct email address pops right up in the little window so they confirm that it is correct.

But the result hoped for is that so many people confirming their email address will shut PayPal down because their servers can't handle the load. So the person who unwittingly clicks on the link helps shut them out of their own accounts and it can help drive customers away too if their servers are so busy with those phony email confirmations that long delays result.

That's what I think is happening. Basically a denial of service attack driven by PayPal's own customer base.

Neat trick but I'll bet shady Storm Pal is behind it one way or the other.