One of the more complex scams we’ve seen all year is turning up in Aussie inboxes, as scammers send a bogus invoice and expect you to call in to cancel.
I sat there staring at the string of letters and numbers and characters all culminating in something that appeared all too real when I knew I was looking at a scam.
Like every day, a scam had arrived in my inbox, but like the regular assortment that are easy to tell, this one was difficult because it didn’t just look legitimate, it came from a real established place.
Most scams have to fake quite a few elements, or provide things near enough to trick you. Scams are a con, and because scammers can make a lot of money by tricking you to click and hand over your details, they’ll use fake sender IDs for mobile text messages, similar names for companies in emails, build fake versions of websites if they want to pretend to be things you trust like the government, and social engineering if they want to dodgy things on social media.
But by and large, they have to fake something.
An email popped up in this writer’s inbox this week that actually wasn’t fake, and yet was still a scam.
It looks like it’s from PayPal, and the link definitely matches up with a PayPal one, but there are indications this PayPal isn’t legit. This isn’t your regular PayPal scam, and frustratingly to find it out, you have to know how to peek behind an email and see what’s going on. Kinda sorta.
What is going…
