PayPal Hoax

Since so many people have PayPal accounts on this site I thought it would be of interest.
I didn't receive the e-mail in question but several others including the person in the office next to mine did.
The following is from our county's central IT Department:

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Information Technologies has received reports of County employees receiving a hoax "Paypal" e-mail with attachments. Should you receive this or any other suspicious e-mail please call the Help Desk immediately at XXXX. Do not open any attachments.

The e-mail in question is in the form of the following message;

From: [email protected]
Subject: IMPORTANT
Message:

Dear PayPal member,

We regret to inform you that your account is about to be expired in next five business days. To avoid suspension of your account you have to reactivate it by providing us with your personal information. To update your personal profile and continue using PayPal services you have to run the attached application to this email. Just run it and follow the instructions. IMPORTANT! If you ignore this alert, your account will be suspended in next five business days and you will not be able to use PayPal anymore.

Thank you for using PayPal.

Attachment: www.paypal.com.pif -or-
InfoUpdate.exe

Information Technologies staff are working to determine how this e-mail may have entered our e-mail system.


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I got that, same thing, and they said everything was about to expire, and they needed all my banking info, card info, pin number and my socail sucurity number., i was going to go along with it i had almost the whole page filled out, then i said the heck with this, erased everything and deleated the email.

A good rule is to never log onto a password-protected web account by clicking on a link in an email message. It's just too easy for scam artists to send you to a bogus web page instead.

Put the links to PayPal, eBay, etc. in your Favorites list and use those.

Identity theft hell.

There is another scam that mimics an AOL message saying you have received an AOL insta-kiss and you need to enter your screen name and password, as soon as you do they enter your system and use your email address to generate thousands of spam emails until AOL catches it and shuts down YOUR email account.

Aol insta-kiss?!?!?! Geez, what will they think of next? /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

My Dad got hit by this hoax, they withrew $1500 from his checking account. He cought it intime that the money never really left his account.