The Art of Defeating a Paypal Scammer
A few days ago, I was reading my email and I came across this message.
It looked serious. Naturally, I opened it. I was horrified beyond articulation by what I read.
Oh no! Someone who isn't the rightfull owner of my account has made the choise of trying to log into it!! I hope PayPal doesn't temporaly disable my account because of this!
I was already sweating bullets and quivering with terror. Who could have tried to hack into my PayPal account??? In any case, I was grateful for this e-mail from PayPal. I proceeded to follow the instructions. Thank goodness for Hotmail as well, employing Microsoft's failproof spam-detecting algorithms; they always brilliantly deliver this type of important e-mail to my inbox rather than accidentally slipping it into my junk mail folder.
Feeling anxious, I entered my information as quickly as I could.
Come on!... I have to verify my account! Before it's too late!
In reality, there is nothing funny about this. There are undoubtedly people who have committed suicide after falling for similar deceptions. Anyone with a conscience should be pissed off.
Who is making it so easy for these guys to get away with it?
- Microsoft. Absent-mindedly delivering an e-mail spoofing the domain of a major business is outright neglectful. It could easily be interpreted as spam by the most rudimentary e-mail filter; and yet, beyond belief, I found it in my inbox.
- PayPal. Much of the content is being linked to directly. The PayPal logo is hotlinked, and all of the Help links are direct links to PayPal. They should deliver a warning to the user when the referrer domain pretends to be their own site.
- Whoever owns the machines the site is hosted on, regardless of whether they were hacked. If your machine is insecure, you're doing the world no favors.
...and that's where you come in. Believe it or not, you've probably been passively helping to stop the scammers as you've been reading this page.
Among the few files actually hosted by the scammers is this small image. It is only 3k, but imagine the impact it could have if we all worked together?
If you have Flash installed, then by keeping this page open, you automatically attempt to download that small image once per second. The more users idle on this page, the greater the likelihood that this scammer's tool will be brought offline.
Keeping this page open is your vote for having this scam taken offline. Hopefully, and unlike a formal complaint submitted to whomever, this will have results we can see.
For your entertainment, I have created a live statistics program so that we can watch the progress together. You know the scammer's URL from the images; feel free to check whether it has been brought down. To reveal the statistics, scroll to the top of this page and click in the box. Enjoy!