"Forced To Suspend Your Account"

It must be the holiday season.

I got not one, but TWO e-mails yesterday, one from eBay and one from PayPal, telling me that there was fraudulent activity on my accounts and thus I needed to log in and verify my information or they'd be "forced to suspend your account" (IE my account). Conveniently, each e-mail provided a link to take me to the respective "website".

LOL! Yeah, right!

I call: BULL DROPPINGS!

By merely waving my cursor over the link, it was obvious that it was going somewhere other than eBay and PayPal.

Obviously, these jerks must have some successes, because they keep sending this garbage to me, and I keep forwarding them to spoof@paypal.com and/or spoof@ebay.com. The return e-mail always says the same thing, that the message did NOT come from PayPal or eBay.

Look, to protect yourself, NEVER use a link provided in an e-mail. It's easy enough to open a new window and go directly to the website, log in, and check your messages. There is ALWAYS a message if it's a real e-mail.

There's no need to panic, any e-mail that threatens some horrible event, whether it's suspending your privileges, freezing a bank account, or bad luck for the next seven years, is a FAKE!

As always, you don't have to believe me.

In fact, don't believe everything you read or hear, it's just too, too easy to be fooled. Even my own mom got sucked in on a phishing (fake) e-mail. Luckily, just after she finished putting her info in, she realized what she'd done and called me. I was able to jump into her account and change the passwords before the thieves did, so all was well...

Sigh. Thank God Mom is a smart woman!

eBay Protection Tutorial: http://pages.ebay.com/help/tutorial/accountprotection/js_tutorial.html
PayPal Security Center: https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_security-center-outside