May 2, 2020

My PayPal Account Locked Over and Over. Or Is It?!

Brian Online Scams PayPal, phishing, Scam 12 Comments

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Welcome back and time to take another look at those pesky email scams I’ve been talking a lot about. Well folks, I have to ask the question, why is my PayPal account locked over and over?! I always get these emails saying there is suspicious activities and that it has either been locked or temporary limited.

I must be doing something wrong with my account if I keep getting it locked time and time again and then having to log in to fix that problem. Maybe there is something else at play here and maybe I’m not really getting locked out of my account. If you’re guessing that I received another PayPal phishing email, you would be correct and that’s what we’re going to be taking a look at. I actually received two of them very recently. Check out one of the phishing emails I received in the past and how I go through it and show how it’s not a legitimate email from PayPal. You can read that here.

The two PayPal phishing emails are a little bit different from each other, but they all have the same goal which is to get you to click on the link in the email and go to the fraudulent site and log in using your real PayPal email credentials. I have never fell for one of those before, but they are starting to get better at making you think it’s a legitimate email. I will actually be looking at 3 PayPal emails and with that, let’s get to it!

PayPal Phishing Email 1

The first email I’m going over is one that I received back on April 29th. I could tell though that it was not a real one just by looking at the heading of the email. It used way too many characters, numbers, letters, and symbols to even resemble something from PayPal.

“Reminder: [ Statement Cases Received ] [ Wednesday,April 29/2020 ] ✉ Important: Latest Information Update About Yоuг РауРаI Асcоuпt Наѕ Вееп Liмited. Case 43479 # [PPXIDTRA254PP1738]# PP — ID : 8574150680“

I’ve talked about this before, but why use all this extra fluff in the email header? The scammers are trying to get you to think this is really serious and so they’ll use things like case numbers and weird ID numbers, and titles such as Statement Cases Received.

Now when I click open the email to take a closer look at it, it says that PayPal is looking out for me and that my account has been assigned with a temporary limited. I’ve talked about this before in regard to a very similar email that also said something about a temporary limited. First of all, what the heck is a temporary limited? That makes no grammatical sense and I’ve never heard a legitimate company use something like that.

What I find really funny is that they supposedly say they’re looking out for me, but if I continuously receive these type of emails where I have a temporary limited or my account is locked, then PayPal would have a really serious security problem and I doubt they would be looking out for me if this really kept happening to my account often.

Now the number one thing I always stress about that will give away that this particular email is a phishing email, is the email address of where it came from in the first place. A legitimate email from the company will almost always have the name of the company itself in its email address. In this particular case, the email came from this address:

“6s6lnsb39hl1@esalpad.com“

As you can see, there is nothing even remotely looking like it is from PayPal. This will always be your number one red flag when you’re checking to see if an email is legitimate or not. When all else fails, always use this method. Now let’s take a look at another one of these emails that I received.

PayPal Phishing Email 2

I don’t know why it seems I’m getting such an increase in receiving these type of emails, but it amazes me how much these scammers keep trying. Imagine if they put these efforts towards a legitimate job! Anyway, let’s take a look at this phishing email. I’ve talked about one very much like this and how this particular phishing email can be a bit more concerning.

We need some information from you

Why do we need this information?

 

We have also temporarily restricted certain features in your PayPal account. At this time, you won’t be able to: 1. Send payment 2. Withdraw funds What to do? Log in to your PayPal account and provide the information requested.

Notice how there really isn’t anything in this particular email that sets off alarm bells in terms of spelling and grammatical errors. Unlike the previous email, they don’t use anything that sounds off such as temporary limited. Instead, they use something that PayPal is more likely to say such as them temporarily restricting certain features in my PayPal account and then gives an example of what those features are that will be restricted.

What’s really concerning is something these scammers are using to make it look like it’s even more legitimate or really came from PayPal. In a previous article, I mentioned how it even had me briefly fooled! When you look to the left of the email heading, you’ll usually see the name of the company where the email is from and in this case it said service@paypal.com

Anyone who is familiar with PayPal and uses it quite often, knows that service@paypal indicates a transaction of some kind has happened at your PayPal account. I’ve recently had some legitimate ones happen on my own personal account and so when I see something like this, I assume a transaction has happened on my PayPal account.

Needless to say, when I saw the email title as well as the email address it came from, I immediately knew that this was a scam. The email address is so long that I can’t even copy and paste the entire thing! Now if the email itself looks legitimate, always refer to the email header as well as the address. Now, let’s take a look at one final PayPal email scam that I received and it surprised me because there was something new in it I hadn’t seen before.

PayPal Phishing Email 3

I received this particular email in the middle of April and it also used the service@paypal.com name to try to make me think that this was a legitimate email from PayPal. The email header was fairly simple as it said “Your PayPal account will close in 12 hours”.

The inside of the email is basically letting me know that there is unusual activity from my account and that they are going to close it before someone can use my credit or debit card from my account and that I must act soon or they will permanently close my account in 12 hours.

First of all, there are some grammatical oddities that caught my attention. Why would you capitalize Credit and Debit card? Another thing too is that they should almost always address you by your first name since it’s supposed to be from PayPal. They should not address you as, “Hi, customer” and it is very small font to see located towards the top of the email.

Now what is new to me is what they included at the bottom of the email. There’s a graphic of a time watch and then in a blue rectangular box, it says “Come see how PayPal is better than ever! Cash out in a flash when people send you money. Its faster than ever”.

I see why the scammers are doing this and it’s because they want this to seem as authentic as possible. The problem is, they made a little grammatical error in that statement. The didn’t put an apostrophe between it and the s and so for me, that was another red flag that this is not from PayPal. Of course, don’t forget about the handy dandy email address that it came from because it surely doesn’t remotely resemble a real email address from PayPal.

Scammers are trying hard to get your information and money!

The only logical conclusion that I have in why I’m seeing a major increase in these type of emails (and you might as well!) is because scammers are trying hard to get access to your money, especially the stimulus money you might have received from pandemic that is affecting us all.

Never ever click any links in these kinds of emails because they will undoubtedly take you to a fraudulent website made to look like PayPal and logging in using your actual PayPal credentials will give the scammers access to your real PayPal account and then they can do some damage. I always stress that in these types of articles because I don’t want to see anyone become a victim of these scammers and lose their hard earned money or even worse, possibly have your identity stolen.

There’s just a wide range of things scammers can do from holding your computer and files hostage, stealing your identity and getting access to your accounts which could even include your bank account, so it’s important that you are careful with what you do online.

Email is not the only way that scammers are targeting people. Lots of unknown phone numbers or numbers that might seem legitimate are being used by scammers to get into contact with people for all sorts of things. There are IRS scammers that lie and say there is an arrest warrant because you’ve failed to pay your taxes, there are social security scammers claiming your social security number has been used for illegal activities and that the FBI is after you, and then there are tech scammers that say you are owed a refund and get control of your computer and want you to log into your bank online so they can “give” you the money, but supposedly give you too much and then want you to give most of that money back via gift cards.

All of this sounds kind of crazy right? Well this stuff happens every day and people unfortunately become victims and end up losing money, in a lot of cases, quite a bit of money and then have their financial lives ruined. What’s sad is that scammers today are using the corona virus to scam people, claiming that they have the cure or a vaccine for the virus and want you to buy it now. Needless to say, there is no cure or vaccine currently so please don’t fall for those. Always stay vigilant folks and feel free to post your comments below!