Posted by David Sherman on Tuesday, March 14, 2006 at 5:54PM :
In Reply to: OT PayPal question posted by Ken See on Tuesday, March 14, 2006 at 9:23AM :
Besides the fact that it doesn't sound right, the link to "paypal" in the email is bogus. The way you can tell is move your mouse pointer over the link and look at what appears in the bottom frame of your browser. It will not be the same as the text that you see in the message. Typically, they'll host their fake "paypal login" page on a computer in a foreign country, which is often Russia. They'll create a URL that looks as much as possible like the real paypal log-in URL, but they can never make it exactly correct. For example, the real paypal login screen is "https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_account", but the scammers might create one like "https://www.paypal.com.bogushost.ru/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_account". Or sometimes, they use a host that doesn't even have a URL, but just a raw DNS address in dotted-decimal format.