They left clues that they were up to no good. Still, the scammers weren’t as smart as they thought. Here are the signs you’re about to fall for a PayPal invoice scam Now they were “charging” me for Walmart gift cards. What’s new? A few years ago, the scammers were billing for cryptocurrency. I did further research and discovered this phishing scam, also known as the PayPal invoice scam, dates back to 2020. But then I could also discover the scam and call the fake PayPal number only to have my password stolen. First, I could pay the real invoice voluntarily. Gullible PayPal customers like me could fall for it in any number of ways. So if you want an immediate answer, you’ll call the redacted number for information - and get through to the scammer. This is the brilliant part: If you go to your PayPal account, you’ll see the invoice. The bottom of the notification lists a number or tells you to go online. The bad guys had piggybacked on the system to make it look like an official billing notice from PayPal. The genius of this scam is that they had used this legitimate tool - an invoicing system - to lure users into revealing their passwords.Īnd you could be next. It turns out any PayPal user can send another PayPal user an invoice. Had someone accessed my account? Did I need to file a report?Īfter a brief wait, a real PayPal representative answered all of my questions. I called PayPal to find out what was happening. Then he would have asked me to log in to my PayPal account.Īfter that, he would have harvested my password and helped himself to the money in my account, which he would have found disappointing because there’s nothing there. He would have asked me to download an app that records my keystrokes. The “representative” would have agreed that this was a scam and said I had a computer security problem. Here’s what would have happened if I had stayed on the phone. I could hear background noise - cars and people talking. “Hello, this is PayPal,” he said in a foreign accent. I dialed the redacted phone number instead of looking up the PayPal number online (after all, the email came from PayPal, so why wouldn’t I?) So the invoice is showing up in my PayPal account.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |