Do You Have A Paypal Account?

Then be very wary if you get an email such as this one:

Dear Member,

Your PayPal account has expired.

You must renew it immediately or your account will be closed.

If you intend to use this service in the future, you must take action at once!

To continue click here, login to your PayPal account and follow the steps.

Thank you for using PayPal!
The PayPal Team

Please do not reply to this email. This mailbox is not monitored and you will not receive a respons(e). For assistence, log in to your PayPal account and click the Help link located in the top right corner of any PayPal page.

PayPal Email ID #

Of course the "link that they want you to click on does not go to the paypal site - it goes somewhere else.

If you have any doubts about your paypal account then you should contact paypal directly - they have a very secure website.

Cookies?

Here is a copy of a recent email that I got:

Hi

A few months back, ~ was approached by an advertiser, offered lots of $$$, and asked to include a spyware cookie on all of our member sites. We refused on the spot.

You install (our service) to track visitors to your site NOT to open yourself and your visitors up to being spied upon by phantom advertising corporations.

It appears, however, that other players in the world of webstats were happy to take up this offer.

We were shocked to discover just today that another well known stats provider is allowing up to 9 cookies to be installed in the browser of every visitor that hits one of their member websites. This means that the provider is making money by transmitting data on you and your visitors to a third party advertiser. Not only that, but to add insult to injury, the cookies are causing the member websites to load very slowly too.

In light of this, (we) wants to assure you that we track your visitors for you, only you and not any one else.

Foreclosure101: Be Careful Of Spam!

Here is a recent blog post that I posted to my blog about foreclosures:

Foreclosure101: Be Careful Of Spam!

Be Careful of Spam

We Suspect Unauthorized ATM Activity On Your Account!

Here is a copy of a recent email that I received:

Dear ~,

We recently reviewed your account, and we suspect an unauthorized ATM based transaction. Therefore as a preventive measure we will temporary limit your access to sensitive Abbey features.

To ensure that your account is not compromised, please login to your Abbey Online Banking and verify your identity to prevent deactivation.

SERVICE: Abbey Online Banking.

What you need to do:

- Go to: Abbey Online Banking

- Login to Online Banking.

Thanks for your patience.

Sincerely,

Abbey National Centre

****************************************************************************

For any inquiries, contact Customer Service.

****************************************************************************


Of course I have never heard of this place before!

But I post it here so that you can see that this is just yet another example of attempts to get one's account information.

If you get any kind of email like this and you DL have an account with the company in question - DO NOT RESPOND BY CLICKING ON ANY OF THE LINKS THAT ARE PROVIDED!

Call the company itself and find out for sure whether or not there is something wrong with your account - whether it be your banking account or some other company that you have a financial account with!

Ebay Scam!

I am a member of Ebay and so far I haven't had an problems with it. But I recently became aware of someone else's experience that really should "raise a warning flag" when it happens.

A bidder put in a bid for a certain, specific item but lost the bid to a higher bidder - which of course can happen.

BUT the bidder then received an email from the person that placed the item (or so they said they were the person that placed the item) asking him if he still wanted the item. Of course the bidder said yes and plans were made to get the information about payment and shipping. Then the bidded gets a second email from someone who wanted to give them different information about where to send the payment. (The second email came with the information that now the item was available at a lower price.) This raised a "warning flag" with the bidder and he decided that he no longer wanted the item.

Unfortunately the bidder has been receiving email after email about the item and whether or not they still want it or not - which is becoming quite a nuisance.

Now there are some things that I could say here about how this was done but I don't want to give anyone any ideas on how they can do the same thing.

Why Do People Spam?

Why do people spam?

They want to get their message across to as many people as possible! I'm at a message board now that has to do with people having problems with there blogs and there are a lot of spam messages - particularly one from some kind of escort service located outside the United States.

I'm assuming that they are spamming this particular message board because the message board has a lot of traffic so that means that their spam messages about their escort servie / dating service has the potential to be seen by a lot of people.

You may laugh or be generally irritated by these tactics but the fact of the matter remains that the more number of people that read the spam the more the potential of someone actually wanting to find out more about it! It's a "numbers" thing!

The Junk Mail Seems To Be Getting More Sophisticated!

There seemed to be a time - way back when - when you got junk email the messge was included in the email.

Now I am seeing more and more junk mail that has "eye-catching" subject lines like "reduce your debt" or "free money" - please see my Grant Basics 101 Blog - but the body of the junk email sometimes just includes a line or two prompting one to "click here".

Of course this means that the junk email wants you to go to their website.

You just can't be too careful these days! Legitimate-looking clicks could be not-so legitimate!

When these kinds of emails show up in my inbox - I delete them!

Here is a clear, cut case of spamming one's blog! The following was posted as a comment to one of my blogs. The comment had nothing to do with the subject matter of the blog.


I wanted to let you know about our company. We sell 3 day 2 night travel certificates that are used by many companies as incentives.

The cost is only 0.35 cents each and they come with your company name and website imprinted on the certificates.


http://www.~.com

Think about using these for referrals or give them to customers/clients. You can sell them for a profit to your down-line.

The end user of the certificates has a choice of over 20 destinations to pick from. Take a look at the destinations at the website. http://www.~.com

They pay a processing fee of $12.00 and the taxes on the room which is about $7.00-$12.00 a night depending on the location.

http://www.~.com

Of course I "rejected" the comment

"If You Can't View The Image Click Here"

I got one of those emails today. At the top it said if you can't view the image then click on the link that was provided.

It is always a very good idea to run your curser over the link just to see where that link goes to. If you're not familiar with that link then you should beware and not click on the link if you're not comfortable doing so.

Of course the email itself didn't show the image and personally I think it was some kind of ploy to get me to click on the link.

I didn't click on the link! And I deleted the email!