{"id":243,"date":"2004-11-08T15:52:00","date_gmt":"2004-11-08T15:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/the_web\/update.paypal-verifications.net.html"},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"1970-01-01T05:00:00","slug":"updatepaypal-verificationsnet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/2004\/11\/08\/updatepaypal-verificationsnet","title":{"rendered":"update.paypal-verifications.net is a scam"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> I got an email this morning asking me to update my ebay account information (or my account would be frozen). I was suspicious, of course. My text-based mailreader <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mutt.org\">mutt<\/a> rendered the link as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.paypal.com\/cgi-bin\/webscr?cmd=_login-run\">http:\/\/www.paypal.com\/cgi-bin\/webscr?cmd=_login-run<\/a>, but when I inspected the HTML it actually points to update.paypal-verifications.net. <\/p>\n<p> A <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?hl=en&#038;lr=&#038;client=firefox-a&#038;q=%22paypal-verifications.net%22\">google search on &#8220;paypal-verifications.net&#8221;<\/a> gives almost no results. <\/p>\n<p> It&#8217;s obvious now that this is a scam, because paypal doesn&#8217;t own &#8220;update.paypal-verifications.net.&#8221; If you go to the domain, you&#8217;ll see a look-alike PayPal login screen, which presumably is there to collect your paypal login and do nefarious things with it, like steal money. <\/p>\n<p> So I thought I&#8217;d do my little part by making it clear that <em>update.paypal-verifications.net is a scam<\/em>, and someone should shut down that website ASAP. In the meantime, at least this bit of information should show up in google searches soon. <\/p>\n<p> As a general matter, for the less fraud-savvy of you out there, always beware of emails along these lines. I&#8217;m not sure there&#8217;s any bright line test to immediately recognize fraud, but at least pay attention to the actual URL, and ask yourself whether the whole thing makes sense. <\/p>\n<p> <span class=\"smallcaps\">Update:<\/span> Someone who read this entry contacted the abuse division of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.afraid.org\">afraid.org<\/a>, the (free) DNS provider for paypal-verifications.net. The domain name has now disappeared from the DNS. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I got an email this morning asking me to update my ebay account information (or my account would be frozen). I was suspicious, of course. My text-based mailreader mutt rendered the link as http:\/\/www.paypal.com\/cgi-bin\/webscr?cmd=_login-run, but when I inspected the HTML it actually points to update.paypal-verifications.net. A google search on &#8220;paypal-verifications.net&#8221; gives almost no results. It&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}