In addition to being a longstanding PayPal Member, and realizing that our Synthzone forum includes PayPal donate options, I thought it important to share with you all this:

A week ago I received an email supposedly sent from PayPal, and appearing VERY CONVINCINGLY as official PayPal email stationary, saying that all PayPal members must update their account by Sept 17, 2004 or face account suspension. This email also included website links to update your account. The link itself read: 'click here to update your account', but when I checked the link, it went to this address: http://ns1.frandt.com/suspended.page/

On the SAME page, it said: you can log on to your PayPal account to confirm your email address by clicking the following link which read: http://www.paypal.com/us , BUT, if you ACTUALLY CHECK the link address, it really goes to an entirely DIFFERENT website altogether: http://www.subme.frandt.com/suspended.page/

I then decided I'd better sign on to my PayPal account directly by typing in PayPal's actual official website address manually:

https://www.paypal.com/

After doing this, & providing my user name & password, I find my PayPal account working just fine.

It's obvious that the email I received was an illegal attempt to find out my PayPal account and obtain sensitive information.

Curious if anyone else here has encountered this type of email? In the meantime, I've emailed PayPal directly to report this.

The bottom line is, you must proceed with caution on the internet.

Scott

Hello Scott,
I had these e-mails last year already.. and did take same action as you did, and on top informed paypal..
These emails are clearly intented to get your details for fraude.

fred

I've gotten a few myself. It always seems that after I do a transaction I get one of these. I've forwarded them to PayPal, who assures me they are false and to be extra careful about clicking on unknown links. I always sign in to PP through my own shortcut. I am leary about anything from PP or eBay that saysanything other than I've won or lost an auction.

Same here, about 2 years ago. I responded and wound up having my account completely convoluted. Never got it running again, but was able to have it inactivated before it cost me anything.

You'll get these messages claiming to come from your ISP, Ebay, Paypal, anyone you do business with on the web. Report them. Don't take them seriously for one minute.

The one I got from Ebay took me by surprise because the link went to something like
suspend/ebay.com - which is a pretty realistic link.

If these guys send out a million spam messages and get one idiot out of ten thousand, then they were able to access one thousand accounts.

Beakybird

This has been the preferred method of hijacking e-bay accounts too. You get a message, seemingly from e-bay. that tells you your account is in trouble (usually for some reason that will outrage you so you click through ASAP). Then they tell you to follow the enclosed link, log in and verify some detail or other.

By the time you realize something is up, you've already sent your usrname and password to some leech who will then use your account to list one of those "I'm currently traveling in another country and the product itself is in Spain / Greece/ Turkey / Uzbekistan" ads that are the #1 hallmark of e-bay fraud.