I didn’t wake up this morning, slowly, leisurely, and gently, I was jolted awake when I restarted my phone, first thing, (stupid thing froze AGAIN, but that is for another story) and I saw an email from Paypal.  Apparently my payment to Dana Swanson, whom I have never heard of, for over $900US, was being processed and would take a while to show up in my recent activity!  My heart started racing, my mouth went dry, and I bolted downstairs to my computer, to view the email properly.  Now, as I was loading my Paypal account, I realized that the email address where I received this message, does NOT have a Paypal account associated with it, and just that, was enough to easily confirm that I had received a fraudulent email.

Of course, looking at my bank account, my Paypal account, and the realization that they had the wrong email address, all added up to something fishy, but when I was on the official Paypal page, I went into, and read a note regarding how to tell if a message such as I received, was a scam, and all the elements were very clearly in the email I was looking at.  The first clue was, the salutation was Dear Paypal User.  Paypal assures us that they would address us with first and last name, in any correspondence. They also are quite clear that they would never have us click any link, except in the case of resetting our passwords.  There were two places I could have clicked into, the ID number for the transaction, and a link to view the transaction.  Thankfully, even in my sleepy state, I didn’t click anything, forwarded the email to spoof@paypal.com, and deleted the offending note from computer and phone.

I had started to add this little warning to facebook, and be done with it, but I knew this was too long to put into a status update, so even though I hate doing little posts here, I decided it would be the fastest method to get the message to my friends.  I have now passed it on to you.  Be careful.  This email looked very legit, until I dug a little deeper!