I got this email recently:
Your Payment Agreement
Dear customer,
You have set up a Payment Agreement to automatically pay your eBid seller fees with PayPal. The description of your agreement is shown below:
Description: eBid Seller Fees
If you did not authorize this agreement please click the link bellow:
https://www.paypal.co.uk/xxxxxxxxxxxx
Please do not reply to this email. This mailbox is not monitored and you will not receive a response. For assistance, log in to your PayPal account and click the Help link in the top right corner of any PayPal page.
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Copyright 使1999-2009 PayPal. All rights reserved.
PayPal (Europe) S.a r.l. & Cie, S.C.A.
Societe en Commandite par Actions
Registered Office: 22-24 Boulevard Royal L-2449, Luxembourg
RCS Luxembourg B 118 349
Now since I do belong to Paypal, I almost thought that this email was real until I looked at the provided link more closely! The link
DOES NOT take you to a legitimate Paypal site! Instead it goes somewhere else.
If you have a Paypal account you have to be very careful when you get any Paypal-related email. Since belonging to Paypal means that you are doing financial transactions online you want to be very careful that no one else - besides you and Paypal - have access to your account! If you do get a Paypal-related email you should not click on any link provided! What you should do is go directly to your Paypal account and see if there are any problems with your Paypal account.
I have had the experience of talking to Paypal on the phone and so far I haven't had any problems with them yet - indeed a few of those times the people that I talked to were very helpful!
These kinds of emails are sent because people are "phishing" for you account information. Once they have your account information they may be able to withdraw your Paypal funds!
So you have to be very careful!