Dave, I’m getting more and more confused. I keep getting warnings and alerts from PayPal, eBay, my bank, and various other banks and financial institutions that I don’t even have accounts with, all telling me to log in and verify my account information. I’ve read about something called “phishing” and am wondering if that’s what these messages actually are?

You’re right to be suspicious! These are indeed what us industry folk call phishing (rhymes with fishing): fake email messages purporting to be from legitimate sites, they redirect you to clones of the real site and their sole purpose is to get you to click on the link and log in to their mock sites.

These are bogus messages sent by online criminals.

This afternoon, I received a message that looks exactly like it came from PayPal. It had a PayPal return address, a legit looking case address, and even a link on the bottom to the PayPal privacy policy. In the middle was the important link, though…

[Continue reading How Can I Tell If My Paypal And eBay Alerts Are Legit Or Phishing? at Ask Dave Taylor]