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My day started rough.
It was 7 a.m., and I was just partially through my first cup of coffee, when I noticed a new message in my email inbox. It was from PayPal and the subject line said, “You’ve got a money request.”
And so began my first look at this three-pronged PayPal phishing scam.
The scam attempt
There’s nobody I know who would ask me for money through PayPal and reasonably expect to get it, especially without telling me ahead of time that they were invoicing me for something. I started to investigate the money request in my Gmail box.
In Gmail, you can right-click on the message sender before opening the message, in order to see the full email address.
The message was from PayPal, so I felt safe enough opening it. Once inside the message, I again looked at the sender, and it was still PayPal. The body of the message claimed to be from one Susan Bowman. Here, take a look at the message.
The mistaken “fraudulently” instead of “fraudulent” is one sign there. But the sentence that caught my attention was “You will be charged $699. 99 today.” Interestingly, there was a space between the period after $699 and the 99. Odd punctuation and spelling are often indicators of a scam message.
Also: This phishing attack uses a countdown clock to panic you
Another part of the message said, “Please call us as soon as possible at toll free number [REDACTED]. to cancel…
