Dear Paypal, dear Domain-Admins, dear Domain-owner,

Today I received the attached hoax mail from a site pretending to be PayPal and the need to re-verify (re-enter) all my PayPal data including credit-card and SSN info.

This was a criminal attempt to get hold of my personal and finance key information and a definitve act of fraud attempt.

The mail used a known IE6-bug for faking URLs with the following url-href text

www.paypal.com%01…01@pp.youlikeshe.com

This again re-redirected to the real hoax-page that prompted for all my personal data. I enclosed that page as html-source for further investigation.

smbc.ch/p/verify.htm

that posts to the verify.php script on the same server.

Please take what further action is possible for you to stop this fraud.

thank you & merry xmas,

Christoph C. Cemper

24 hours later:

• only auto-forwarders from the domain-admins and a long mail from paypal

Thank you for bringing this suspicious email to our attention. We can

confirm that the email you received; was not sent to you by PayPal. The

website linked to this email is not a registered URL authorized or used by

PayPal. We are currently investigating this incident fully. Please do not

enter any personal or financial information into this website.

If you have surrendered any personal or financial information to this

fraudulent website, you should immediately log into your PayPal Account and change your password and secret question and answer information. Any

compromised financial information should be reported to the appropriate

parties.

If you notice any unauthorized activity associated with your PayPal

transaction history, please immediately report this to PayPal by following

the instructions below:

1. Go to https://www.paypal.com/

2. Click on the Security Center at the bottom of the page

3. Click on "Report a Problem"

4. Select the Topic: Report Fraud

5: Select the Subtopic: Unauthorized use of my PayPal Account, and click

Continue.

6. Follow the instructions to access the appropriate form

update 29.12.

There's a new bookmarklet out for detecting such scam – check it out

update 25.8. 2006 – almost 3 years later

I am still getting a ton of paypal scams in my inbox, so I posted a follow up article