Phishing, that act of impersonating another person via email to get you to log in to a false website designed to steal your personal information is rampant. I get emails a few times a day from people claiming to be banks, PayPal, EBay etc… stating that my account has been breached and that I need to login to reactivate features that have been turned off to ‘protect my security.’ They always sound real, at least mostly real, but every once in a while there are telltale signs of something fishy with the phishing (other than the fact I don’t have an account at that particular institution).
My current latest smelly phish is from an email claiming to be from PayPal. First sign it was not legitimate was the fact that it came to an email address that is not tied to a PayPal account. The text of the email was pretty convincing, and they had a link to ‘fix’ the issues, and then they had the following paragraph:
“If you choose to ignore our request, you leave us no choise but to temporaly suspend your account.”
Now, one would think that if you want to represent yourself as a reputable company, you would at least use a decent, English spell checker.
Idiots.
I have had a few of those, and almost everyone has at least one spelling error. I guess criminals are just getting lazy, or just trying to get the proverbial low hanging fruit.