I almost fell for it

Perhaps I’m getting smarter, but I almost fell for it. And thanks to my friend Felicia Slattery for having written about her experience a few months ago that kept me on my toes during this ordeal.

I got an email from service@paypal.com. It said that Ro had requested that I pay 1399.99. The sender email was legit and I checked the headers to make sure (later I assumed they somehow spoofed the email address, but for now it looked very real).

Further the message said: “Don’t recognize the seller? Please contact PayPal Support Team immediately at +1(888) 202-9116 (Toll Free). If you have any issues, you can also contact +1(888) 241-3040 (Toll Free). If you do not reach out, we will proceed with the transaction.”

Transaction ID U-94N58984KY924171D

I immediately went to my PayPal account and did a search for this transaction. I couldn’t find it.

So, I called the number. It was answered as “PayPal Customer Support. Please hold, we will answer your call in the order it was received. You are currently caller 3.”

So far, this sounded legitimate. When the rep answered the phone, he clearly had an Indian accent, but I didn’t necessarily find that unusual. The only thing he asked me for was my PayPal email address, which so far didn’t raise any suspicions. Obviously he needed to know what account he was looking at.

He asked how many devices had access to my account. Well, I have three: 2 computers and my cell phone. He told me to stop using my cell phone as that is how the hackers had gotten access to my account.

Then he told me that he wanted me to go to this site: cancelmyorder.top. I went to the site and now I was full-blown suspicious. The site had a PayPal logo on it, but it didn’t look like a PayPal site.

I started asking questions like, “How do I know you are really from PayPal?” to which he responded, “Sir, you called us, we didn’t call you. This is PayPal Customer Service.”

“Okay,” I said, “I need you to prove it to me. Tell me what my current PayPal balance is.”

“I can’t do that,” he said. “It is against our policy to give out any account information on a recorded line as that is one way hackers get into your account.”

He went on to say that he was going to enable two-factor authentication on my account to prevent hackers from getting in. Since I already had 2FA on my account, I was pretty sure now that this was a scam.

I hung up.

Then I ... CONTINUE READING ...