The future separation of Paypal and eBay will cause an increase in phishing attempts
In September 2014, eBay announced the intention of separating from his Paypal subsidiary acquired in 2002. This separation, which is expected in the second half of 2015, is getting closer and the details of this divorce are being revealed.
If you are a PayPal user, you may have already received an email entitled “Our Legal Agreements are changing”. Inside you can read that “Soon, PayPal and eBay will no longer be part of the same group of companies and will operate as unrelated organization”. It implies that “Use agreement, Acceptable Use Policy and Private Policy” will be updated in order to “continue providing the same great services you are used to.”
The email then prompts the user to click on a link for “details of these changes”. It redirects to the paypal.com site and gives access to Policy update.
The image above is the image of the email received from Paypal to indicate changes to come after his future separation from eBay.
Scammers are always on the lookout for opportunities. You will probably also receive e-mails being phishing attempts usurping Paypal identity, or even that of eBay. Scammers will take advantage of the official communication to send phishing attempts. They will try to rip a few distracted or misinformed internet users about this practice.
Remember the three techniques to distinguish a genuine email from Paypal:
- The email sender address must be paypal.com or paypal.co.uk (or paypal.[your country code])
- The email must include your first name and your last name (and not “Dear Customer” or “Dear user”)
- The link in the email should redirect to a paypal.com address (Pay attention to the fact that “paypal” must be just before the .com, for example “paypal.xyz.com “is NOT an official paypal site)