When will the phishing stop

Today I had about 10 different banks or money transfer companies like Paypal contact me to let me know someone has been doing something with my account. All I have to do is click this link and confirm my information so that they can investigate the unusual transactions or dispute. Of all of them I knew one by name, most were not even in my country, let alone a place that I had an account with. You have got to love those mass email programs.

It seems people actually fall for this phishing and give their information out because someone emailed them asking for it. There must be a lot of money in it because these thieves do put a lot of work into making their fake websites look like the real thing. Also because most of the crimes take place outside of their country and over the Internet it is hard to find them and then prosecute them. So they are getting away with it and people like me are paying the price.

I stopped using eBay because someone used another person’s account fraudulently and I ended up being out almost $500.00 and a lot of time. It seems that the thief may have used phishing to get the person’s eBay and Paypal information. Then they used it to buy up about ½ a million dollars worth of high end jewelry on eBay, and had it all rush shipped before the fraud was caught by the person who’s account they were using. This one person burned many people within a few hours, most lost rings valued at $2000 to $10,000. Multiply that by the number of people who actually fall for the phishing emails they could be making millions in a very short time. All of which is in untraceable product that is easy to transform into money.

Rule of thumb, if you get an email questioning your account information on anything do not respond directly to the email or use any links on it. Go to the web site using a link you know is theirs and then check out your information. If someone is sending you an email about your account there should be a message on your account. Almost every company and bank out there now has contact information on where to send phishing emails to so they can investigate it. If you get one take the time to pass the information on to the company or bank. As an individual all we can do is add it to our Spam list and delete it. I am not sure what a company can do at this point but at least they are taking it seriously.

Paypal is back, why did it go down?

Paypal is back up. No explanations yet for what happened that had Paypal down for most of the day. I wonder how many sales were lost, how many websites are now looking for other payment gateways. It is not like there are not 100’s of them out there. What ever caused this has hit Paypal a large blow. People are not going to be so trusting with their money now. It only takes one time not being able to access my funds to make me to start looking around for another payment gateways. Even if it is just a back up so I can continue to do business if Paypal goes down again. At this point most sales at www.medievalmagic.ca are done threw Paypal but now we are going to spend the extra money to get the software so we can use other gateways. I am sure that there are a lot of other companies doing the same thing, not to mention the number of individuals who are going to start questioning using Paypal. I guess it all depends on what explanation they give every one. I doubt that they would tell us if some one hacked in and did this. It would destroy our perception of security. Not that people are not having their accounts broken in all the time, it is just usually because some one gave their information to the wrong people. Darn those scam emails. At this point in time most people feel secure using Paypal. However, I want to know why Paypal was down for so long.