Just had this one through today, to an email address that’s only used by my web design clients (so unfortunately, some-one’s computer in that link is currently infected with a email harvesting virus):
—–  
From: PayPal [mailto:service@paypals.co.uk]  
Sent: 04 May 2009 19:07  
To: customer@paypal.co.uk
Subject: Receipt for Your Payment to Play and Connect Ltd  

Dear PayPal member, You sent a payment of £100.00 GBP to Play and Connect Ltd (fairyland@playandconnect.com) 

Issues with this transaction? Y

ou have 5 days from the date of the transaction to cancel it. If you haven’t authorized this charge ,click the link below to cancel transaction: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run&dispatch=5885d80a13c0db1fa798f5a5f5ae4
[Link: http://paypal.co-uk.dt6.pl/?cmd=_login-run&dispatch=5885d80a13c0db1fa798f]

Please do not reply to this email. This mailbox is not monitored and you will not receive a response.

For assistance, log in to your PayPal account and click Help in the top right corner of any PayPal page.

To receive email notifications in plain text instead of HTML, log in to your PayPal account, go to your Profile, and click Notifications

Copyright ©1999-2009 PayPal. All rights reserved. PayPal (Europe) S.а r.l. & Cie, S.C.A. Sociйtй en Commandite par Actions Registered Office: 22-24 Boulevard Royal L-2449, Luxembourg RCS Luxembourg B 118 349 PayPal Email ID PP120
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This one did take me a few moments to recognise the phishing scam rather than the immediate recollection I normally have. So how did I know?

• The ‘To:’ field is customer@paypal.co.uk (rather than one of my actual paypal email addresses)
• It’s from a company I’ve never had any dealings with (normally a good warning sign) for a product I don’t recognise
• The ‘cancel transaction’ link, as I expected. If you hover over the link in the actual email (which claims to go through to PayPal.com), you’ll see it link up to the website http://paypal.co-uk.dt6.pl/

Because of the nature of the link, each of these emails will probably go through to a unique URL (web address), which flags up on their system you actively use that email, wrongly (which means far more junk mail and phishing scams coming through to you). Similarly of course, giving your full username and password on the page requested, will mean your account will be subsequently hacked pretty quickly, and you’ll loose money!

How can you prevent this type of phishing scam succeeding?

1. Never click on PayPal links in emails, to process any sort of transaction you’re notified about. Always type the PayPal.com web address directly into your browser window. (The same applies to banking emails, etc.)
2. Have unique email addresses for different purposes (ideally one per company you sign up to, etc. and have these all forwarding automatically through to a smaller selection of email addresses you can pick up easily).
3. If you do want to check the URL in an html type email.. normally just hover your mouse over the link (without clicking on it), and check the URL carefully. Normally phishing scams are sub-domains of sub-domains of random websites (ie http://paypal.com.something-random.zz/ljasdasDAlkjasdaalalsad… )
4. Upgrade to the most recent Internet Explorer 8, which highlights the actual domain name you’re on (or one of the others, like Mozilla, Chrome, Safari)
5. Keep your anti-virus (ie http://free.grisoft.com) up-to-date, and check regularly for malware, spyware, etc.
6. Never send bulk emails to the ‘To:’ or ‘Cc:’ field. Always use the ‘Bcc:’ field when sending group emails.

If you have any questions about any of the points raised above, please do contact us at Parlour Design.