Online Scams

[Disco Scratch]

Alright so if any of you use PayPal just be aware that scams are out there especially around the holidays. I think that when people receive a notice about activity on their account they don't think and they just panic. So I'm going to walk you through the process I go through when I receive a legitimate looking scam.

So first I receive the email and it's in the junk folder, which already raises my suspicion, but just because it's in the junk folder doesn't mean anything because I receive a lot of real emails in my junk folder. So let's take a look and see if this is a legitimate notice.



Then when I open it up I see that it looks like someone made a transaction. Oh no! Someone is in my account! PANIC! Quick, what do I do?! Oh there's a place for me to login to my account directly from this email. No thanks! Of course, this is where they get a lot of people. When you click on the link it takes you to a site that looks just like PayPal, but it's the scammer's site.



Since I'm a level headed person the first two things I check is the activity on my accounts so let's take a look at those and see if we see any discrepancies. First we'll look at the recent activity on my PayPal account by logging in through a browser instead of through the email I received.



Well, my PayPal account shows no transactions. Now let's login to my actual bank account and look at the recent activity there and see if it lists any PayPal transactions for the amount in the email just to be sure.



So as you can see my last two transactions were through Amazon and neither of them are the amount listed in the email I received. The orders through Amazon were placed on November 28th. I had no transactions for November 29th. So it's safe to assume this is just a scam because all of the evidence shows nothing actually happened on my accounts.

For more information about spotting fake notices from the PayPal FAQs go HERE

Do you know of any online scams going around? Please share it with us so we can avoid it.