Notice to PayPal Users:
PayPal offers an valuable service to people who wish to transact business on the Internet. A division of EBay, with many millions of members, PayPal allows small businesses like Be A Fifer to accept credit card transactions with complete security for everyone involved. I have used it to send money to kids at college, to buy items on auction sites and have them delivered almost immediately. It allows people to purchase items from Be A Fifer with complete confidence that they will receive the item promptly...guaranteed!
However,
This is not a perfect world, and we all have fellow travelers on our planet who are less than honorable. Some of them send out emails like this one:
If an unsuspecting party clicked on "Click here!" they would be taken to a page that is a perfect clone of an authentic PayPal page. If one entered all data requested, credit card and other information could be in the wrong hands, and fraud or even indentity theft would be possible.
The message may come in a variety of forms. I saw one where they claimed that PayPal had their servers crash and some data was lost; to "please reenter the personal account data." Sometimes the email will even open into a duplicate of a real PayPal page. Don't be fooled! Remember that a PayPal Representative will NEVER ask you for your password...NEVER!
In conducting any PayPal transaction, or ANY financial transaction on the Internet, look to see if the address in the address bar begins with "https:" Please note the "s." That means that the transaction is secure. If you are a PayPal member who suspects a phony PayPal notice, notify them at: spoof@paypal.com . They will know what to do. After I reported the above email, the site was down in a matter of minutes.
If you have already submitted your password, etc. to a suspicious PayPal site, contact PayPal immediately and CHANGE YOUR PASSWORD!
Here's another fraudulent one received on August 30, 2004:
If one should click on the link in the email, the address bar shows a somewhat different address as below:
http://www.paypaal.org/us/cgi-bin/webscr_cmd=_login-run/
Notice the misspelling of PayPal as paypaal and also notice that it is a dot org address instead of dot com . Also note that the address in the address bar begins with http: instead of https: The latter denotes a secure connection. Never send any privileged or private information anywhere if the address does not begin with https://
If you clicked on the link and entered your user name and password, your account could be cleaned out or unauthorized charges placed on it. I caught it immedately and forwarded it to spoof@paypal.com
I have many happy and contented students out there, all over the world. I want to keep them all financially safe to the best of my ability. If we report this kind of stuff to PayPal when it occurs, we can get these creeps to do their stealing somewhere else!
In the Spirit of '76,
Ed Boyle