How to detect PayPal and eBay e-mail scams

How to spot and avoid Paypal and eBay scams.

Being two of the largest companies that do business online, eBay and PayPal are often the target of various e-mail scams, phishing schemes, and malicious hacking. Since they also deal with people's financial information such as bank account data, credit card numbers, and purchases they are a huge target for criminals looking to steal bank account numbers, make purchases, and steal credit card numbers.

Detecting most of the PayPal and eBay e-mail scams are relatively easy but they do take a keen eye to detect at times. First of all it is important to realize that neither company, as well as all companies dealing with any kind of personal information or log-in information, will never e-mail, IM, or call you asking for your log-in information, bank account information, or credit card information. Therefore any communications from these companies that appears to ask for this information should immediately be regarded as a scam and an attempt to steal personal information from you.

Besides this red flag, some e-mails look very legitimate and often come with some sense of urgency suggesting that your account will be suspended if you don't provide the information or your credit card will be charged a fee unless you confirm or provide your information. The e-mail addresses and even the links in the e-mail look very real at times. But within these realistic looking items lies clues to proving that they are scams.

E-mail addresses are unique but a few minor changes can make the e-mail address seem real. For example in fake PayPal addresses the 'l' may be a capitalized 'i' and the .com may have a zero in place of the 'o' or be something like .net, .org, .tv , or any of a wide array of variations after the dot. With eBay the same holds true and both may also contain underscores or dashes in the e-mail address. The addresses may say service@paypal or support@ebay before the .coms or dot whatever but generally there is a small change as described above.

As for the actual e-mails if they happen to be written and designed well they will literally mimic a real e-mail from the company. The links may look real too, but simply hovering your mouse button over the link will generally reveal the real link often a small variation on the company's real site or one completely different. Even clicking on the link may bring you to a site that looks identical to the real homepage of the actual company. But again small variations on .coms and changes in the web address show the real difference.

Both companies have scam and fraud departments and encourage anyone who receives these scam e-mails to send the information to them so that they can investigate and alert other users and the authorities.

Remember that neither company will ask for your personal information in any communication initiated by them and that attention to detail can help detect most of these e-mail scams.