Like many Americans, I get a steady stream of fake PayPal emails trying to trick me into revealing my social security and credit card numbers, mom’s birthday and dog’s nickname.
Email scamming used to be an art, a proud institution of creative conning that gave us Nigerian princesses, Euromillion lotteries and other classics. But now I’m wondering if people in this profession even care about the quality of their work.
The picture at right is of my latest PayPal phishing email. It’s just shameful. From the very first line — You’re Billing Information ! — this scam is a proofreader’s nightmare of errors in grammar, spelling, punctuation, style and tone. And the forged email's "from" address of security-center.com shows no imagination at all. Really.
This is the kind of thing that could really hurt the phishing industry’s reputation with consumers.
. . . . . . . . . .
- Scamdex | The email scam resource
- PayPal (the real one) | Protect yourself from fraudulent emails
