Paypal will ALWAYS address you by your first and last name.

 

Quite frankly when I get one of these from either PayPal or eBay I ignore the links on the mail and hop on over to the websites to check on my account.

My mail server strips out viruses & other nasties which would not bother the Mac anyway. About 1/4 of the junk I get on Hotmail are Phishing scams.

My bank called me yesterday and I had them verify who they were by giving me my info over the phone. It was rather funny. The non-funny part was they vomited out all the account info without my verifying who I was aside from asking for me by name when they called. I asked for their name and ext. number and told them I'd be calling them in a few minutes. It turned out to be legit.

 

I get these emails from banks I've never done business with. I often fill out the info requested with stuff like "f*ckyou" for the password etc. I'm not as nice as Jonboy.

 

While you might get some pleasure out of that, you also are confirming your email address to the phisher. So while they cannot drain your bank account, they can certainly sell your e-mail to others and make your spam situation worse.

 

You have a point: they often add your email address to the link and clicking on it will confirm the address. But to avoid being tracked, you can simply copy the link target and edit out the email address ... possibly replacing it with something else to annoy the phisher.

 

Not just email, there's also numerical codes (usually on image files or 1x1 web-bugs) that will verify receipt of mail also.

 

[QUOTE=exceltoexcel,May 26 2005, 12:28 PM] I check the links out they are genuine (at least in what you have here) however I doubt the letter is.