Holidays are the Time for Scams

Holidays are the Time for Scams: a reader asks…

Lately, I’ve been receiving a lot of emails from Paypal saying that someone has billed me. I never ordered anything from any of them, and rarely even use Paypal anyway. Has my Paypal account been hacked?

Not hacked, you’re simply the victim of opportunistic scammers. The holidays are a time of year when scammers are really pushing to try to fool people into doing things they shouldn’t. This year, one popular scam is an email from Paypal such as what you describe. There is no real “money request”, it’s just a scam.

I’ve written before about how to tell if an email is a scam or not. One of the first hallmarks is the From address. However in this case, the email is actually coming from paypal.com. The scammer has setup a fake email account and a Paypal account to go with that, and is using that to send these scam emails out to possibly millions of people in the hopes that at least one of them falls for the scam and contacts them.

The email example you sent me has in the note a phone number to call. This is another hallmark of a scam email. The scammer is hoping you’ll call the number so they can work their psychology tricks on you. Never call a number given in an email. It’s not worth your time dealing with these scammers.

Fake emails can come from anywhere, your bank, credit card company, a delivery service like Fedex or UPS, etc. They pretty much follow similiar traits, asking you for money and giving you a way to contact them if you want to dispute the charges. You need to realize that these are all scams, the “charges” aren’t real, and you run a real risk of getting scammed if you interact with the scammer. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, how educated, or how internet-savvy. Scammers use psychology to get past your defenses and steal real money from you.

This holiday season, please be very wary of anyone who emails, calls, texts, or shows up at your door. It’s an unfortunate factor in 21st century life that crooks are using every creative way they can come up with to get you to part with your money. Please don’t be a sucker.