Don’t Be Fooled By This Paypal Scam

Just log in and press cancel

My husband got an email from Paypal — a payment request for £899. He logged into his account, where a note on the transaction said that £899 already been taken from his account.

“You’ve sent a payment of £899.99 GBP to ESET NOD32. If the transaction is unauthorised contact our customer service support @ +44–800–058–4154”

Fortunately, I’d been sending invoices to some US clients using Paypal, so I knew what had happened. The payment request was from a scammer using a real Paypal account to try to lure people into contacting them outside of Paypal.

No money had been paid out of his account. It was just a request. Once my husband logged into Paypal, he had two options: pay it, or cancel it. He chose the latter. He then telephoned Paypal through their ‘contact us’ page, to alert them to someone using their account for attempted fraud.

The thing is, when you issue an invoice or payment request through Paypal, you can add a note saying anything you want. In this case, the note was designed to panic the recipient into telephoning fraudsters on a fake ‘customer services’ number.

If someone called that number to report fraud on their account, they would be playing into the hands of the scammers and might end up giving…