I recently received an email purportedly from PayPal which looked pretty genuine which had the title “Billing Department of PayPal updated your invoice ( PP44541984 )” and said the following:
“Note from Billing Department of PayPal:
There is evidence that your PayPal account has been accessed unlawfully. $600. 00 has been debited to your account for the Walmart eGift Card purchase. This transaction will appear in the automatically deducted amount on PayPal activity after 24 hours. If you suspect you did not make this transaction, immediately contact us at the toll-free number +1 (888) 402-4069 or visit the PayPal Support Center area for assistance. Our Service Hours: (06:00 a. m. to 06:00 p. m. Pacific Time, Monday through Friday)”
The text itself immediately struck me as spam but the issue was that the email address really looked genuine. I’ve never actually seen a scam email coming from an apparently genuine address before.
I phoned the number (I did google the number first but nothing came up – I should probably have checked it against the PayPal number) and a man with an Indian accent answered. That did ring some alarm bells but I decided I would keep going without giving him any information.
He asked me for the invoice number which I gave him and he said should he cancel it so I said yes. He then asked me to start typing in the search bar in Google chrome. He spelled out the letters of what he wanted me to type (it was a bad line as I was calling on Skype so he had to repeat it a few times) and he asked me to type in bhelp dot info. At this point I concluded it was definitely a scam and did not type in the URL and hung up on him.
Subsequent to that I managed to find some info on the PayPal forums of other people who had been targeted in the same scam and had also hesitated because of the genuine email address.
The scammers are getting ever more clever and I have no idea how they have managed to completely spoof the PayPal email address but just to let other people beware of this. The title of “Billing Department of PayPal updated your invoice” did make me slightly suspicious so I should have trusted my gut!
