PayPal email "Please check your user account": Is it real or only phishing?

Suspicious emails in fake checks

There are currently e-mails that warn PayPal customers about account closure. Allegedly, due to the spread of the corona virus, payment service providers had to save costs. Is the real danger just fishing? We make fake checks.

The spread of the new coronavirus not only leads to uncertainty, disease and social isolation, but also affects many companies and individuals and has economic consequences. In Germany, many companies register for short-term jobs or must completely close their branches. According to the e-mail issued in April, the payment service provider PayPal must also save costs, so it is necessary to close the account.

It is said that 2.9% of unused accounts are now being contacted by email. If the account is not confirmed, the account will be closed. If you tell yourself this information on the PayPal homepage, you will not find any information. Instead, the company stated that PayPal has never requested information from customers via email. Email is just one of them Impostor fishing

Subject: "Please check your user account"
Dear username,
As you know, the COVID-19 virus is spreading rapidly. In addition to the great suffering suffered by infected people, stocks including us also plummeted.
In order to continue to run smoothly in the future, we must make some changes to the sequence.
Only a small percentage of these developments directly affect you.
Currently, we have 2.9% of unused user accounts, which brings us huge costs, and we have to temporarily increase the fee by 0.17%.
What does that mean to you?
We check the connectivity of your account by querying the information you originally provided.
If you do not receive any feedback, your profile will be marked as unused and closed. At the same time, you agree to the smallest cost increase.
Keep in mind that this increase currently only exists! According to the instructions of K-W-G, we must limit the configuration files with or without realizing the route increase.
Your user account is currently restricted.
Continue to use PayPal
After successful account check, this process will be cancelled immediately, and you can use all functions again as before.
We apologize for any inconvenience. Thank you for your patience and attention.
kind regards
Your customer service

So you handle PayPal mail

If you have received this email or similar phishing email from PayPal, you can ignore it. Under no circumstances should you enter your personal data or log in to the linked page, otherwise your account may be taken over. In another example, we used fake data to track phishing scams and discovered how malicious the criminals wanted to use MasterCard data:

This is how criminals steal your MasterCard data

The link in the PayPal phishing email looks like this. To prevent account theft, you should activate PayPal's two-factor authentication. You must confirm a new login attempt via TAN, which will make your account more secure.

So you can learn about new phishing nets

In daily articles, we strive to be ahead of phishing scammers. To this end, we have set up an email address to which you can forward suspicious emails. Just save this address in your email program and forward the suspicious message:

In order not to lose any new reports, you can regularly access our current fraud warning overview. You can also subscribe to Netzwelt on Twitter and Facebook to learn about new articles.

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