Beware The Spoof eMail!
If you’ve set yourself up online in business, then pretty soon your email address will be all over the place and with people that you don’t even know! It’s a fact, people buy and sell email addresses as lucrative assets.
What you must do as a business person, is to protect yourself and to keep on protecting yourself. If you’re selling on eBayit is only a matter of time before one of these emails, loved by scammers the world over, lands in your inbox!
Here’s What You MUST Know
eBay will never send you an email, whether from them or a trading partner, that does not show up in your “My Messages” inbox. If you receive an email from someone saying they are from eBay, go straight to your My Messages, if it is there, it is real! If It isn’t there, it’s a fake! The same is true of anything from a trading partner or a prospective trading partner.
PayPal will NEVER send you an email asking you for your details, period! Any email that arrives in your inbox telling you that ‘PayPal is updating your information’! It’s a scam email and if you follow the instructions in that email, you will lose!
The scammers will frighten you and scare you telling you that your PayPal account is about to be shut down if you don’t respond, but it is a trick. Always send anything suspicious to Spoof at PayPaland they will let you know if your suspicions are correct!
Never click on an email that you suspect is fraudulent! You never know what is embedded in the page and you might just be opening up your computer to anyone to see what you’re doing!
ALWAYS use a new browser window to access any information once you’ve opened what turns out to be a suspicious webpage or email.
Beware of emails from ‘buyers’ tell you that they have paid for an item and then scalding you for not yet shipping the item to you! Go into your PayPal account (using a new browser window) and look if the payment is there! If it is not there, then you have not been paid! DO NOT SHIP THE ITEM!
A day or so later, you will probably receive an email from someone claiming to be PayPal! The email will tell you that you have new funds! The email will look convincing. The logo will be there and so will all the other seals, but it will be a fake!
Again, go into your PayPal account (always using a new browser window) and see if the funds are there! If they are not, forward the email to Spoof at PayPal and let them deal with it!
**TOP TIP**
Have two different email accounts, one for your PayPal and one for your eBay account! That way, if you receive an email supposedly from PayPal and it comes to your eBay account email address, then you know point blank that it is a fake!
Keep your wits about you! NEVER give out any information about yourself, passwords, user names etc. until you are more than 100% sure that you are dealing with a legitimate email/business.
