Post by astudyinscarlet on Nov 23, 2022 14:08:30 GMT
Please if you have a paypal account be really vigilant especially if you get a payment request from someone you don't know/aren't expecting a payment request from. The scammers now are actually doing it through paypal's money request option so it is effectively totally genuine rather than being one of those terrible fake emails where they usually don't even spell paypal correctly. On the whole this scam is probably harmless because they can't actually take the money unless you actively pay the request or you proceed to give the scammers further information about your bank details or anything and probably many of the scammers are just basically firing shots in the dark and hoping the odd one hits the target, but what is really frightening about this is this just happened to a family member this morning, they got one of these requests and they were concerned about it so tried to phone paypal about it; they did not use the number or link in the email, they looked up the number for paypal themselves and somehow the thieves still managed to give them the number not for paypal but to one of these scammers and the scammer already knew a lot of this family member's details. We don't know how this happened, both managing to give them the fake number and already having a lot of their information, but however they did it they tried to steal close to £2000 within about half an hour (not through paypal, via their debit card) and even while this family member was on the phone to the bank getting the transactions and the card stopped the thieves were trying to take even more money. So if you get one of these invoices/requests unless you absolutely know who it's from and what it's for don't pay it obviously and don't click on any links or use any phone number in it, you don't even need to query it with paypal and of course don't give out any banking or anything like that information to anyone over the phone in relation to it, just go into your paypal account through the paypal site itself and cancel these requests. Also report these scam accounts to paypal if possible so they can shut them down.
