Most people immediately delete spoofed phishing emails that make it through their spam filters. These emails appear to come from places like Paypal, Ebay, banks…etc, and the senders are attempting to get you to enter your account/financial details, or click on a link to install malicious code on your computer. A spoofed email looks like the real deal, but if you examine the headers, you can tell it isn’t from that company.
More often than not, the email originates from a domain name that was recently registered, most likely for the phishing attempt. The Whois information is usually private, forged or based in another company. While most people’s immediate response is to delete the email once a phishing attempt is detected, I would recommend reporting the email to the company that purportedly sent it. This will allow them to make an effort to shut the website down and possibly determine who is behind the scheme.
Each company has its own specific place to report suspicious emails, but for Paypal, you may use “spoof@paypal.com.” Additionally, for emails of a spamming nature, you can forward your complaint to the US government by forwarding the email to “spam@uce.gov.” I don’t know how these companies investigate the phising attempts, but phishing hurts us all.
Report Suspicious Emails
When you do this, it is important to not you should Forward the original email without changing anything. You do not even have to type a message etc.
eBay is also “spoof@ebay.com” . Both will yeild a auto-reply, but beyond that who knows what they do with the info. It would be nice to know and I would be willing to forward ALL of the emails that I get, but it just doesn’t seem like they care. Never a reply from a real person..
I do suggest to keep sending the messages to the spoof email address of paypal and ebay to help curb this problem.
Hi,
The forwarded unchanged email should be sent with Full Headers.
Patrick
Elliot,
At least for me, uce.gov doesn’t resolve.
I keep deleting the con emails every day which range from please active your ebay / paypal account to I am the king of some place and have 20 million $ to deposit into your account (all RUBBISH).
This CRIMINALS use email marketing software so they send out the RUBBISH by setting the software to display “real” email addresses from paypal and others alike.