Account frozen PayPal phishing email says

Account frozen PayPal phishing email says

“Your Account has been Frozen” begins the latest PayPal phishing email to hit the MailShark email filters. Once again, PayPal users are being hit with a phishing campaign. Yet again, the links in the email lead to a phishing site.

We have reproduced the email in question in Figure A. The subject line of the email is “Your account has been frozen temporarily in order to protect it.” The sender of the email is shown as “PayPal team”. It’s a moderate level phishing email.

The email starts with “Your Account has been Frozen” in large text. This precedes the salutation, which is “Dear customer”. The email goes on to state that the recipient’s PayPal account has been frozen. The reason given is that the user’s PayPal account has been accessed from an unknown device.

Contained in the body of the email are a button and a text link. The button has “Confirm account” on it. The link has the text “Confirm Now”. The recipient of the email is advised to confirm their account by clicking on one of the links. The links lead to a reasonable copy of the PayPal site. Details are requested of the user, including credit card numbers.

As we have mentioned in the past, social engineering is used to try to trick the recipient into clicking on a link. The criminals have in this case used a big heading titled “Your Account has been Frozen”. This title precedes the salutation, in an effort to catch the user’s eye and panic them into wondering what has happened, and what to do next.

This email is a fake. Numerous errors in grammar give the email away as bogus. Furthermore, mousing over the links shows that they do not lead back to PayPal. Finally, the salutation is not personalized. If you receive this email, delete it.

Scott Reeves
MailShark
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