By BECKY RUTHERFORD
Los Alamos
PayPal is a great online tool for receiving and sending money, and likely most of us have used it. But did you know that this tool can be abused by cyber criminals and used to steal your money?
Next time you get an invoice from PayPal, think twice before paying it.
The latest wave of PayPal themed scams involves Trust Wallet, a crypto-currency wallet.
Crypto wallets are used to securely buy, send, receive, trade and store crypto currency.
In this latest phishing trend, users receive emails from PayPal showing payment due from “Trust Wallet” with a legitimate looking invoice for hundreds of dollars.
See the below image from Bleepingcomputer:
It looks pretty legitimate, right? As you can see, the emails actually do come from PayPal. How are the scammers doing this? They just create a PayPal account called Trust Wallet, in no way affiliated with the actual company, and send unsuspecting victims the fake invoices. The scammers likely got the email addresses from leaked email addresses on the dark web, or via other sources. This is an unfortunate side effect of data breaches- your data is floating around on the internet, easily available for the bad guys to grab and use.
This one is a tricky one, since it actually comes from PayPal; the scammers are abusing legitimate services to send phishing emails. So that can be confusing, but remember, they are counting on users to pay the invoice without questioning it. Question everything. Ask yourself, did I purchase something from Trust Wallet, is there a reason they’d be invoicing me via PayPal? Likely the answer is no. Even though the invoice is coming from a legitimate source, if you haven’t ordered anything from Trust Wallet, or from anyone in that amount, you can be sure it’s a scam. Abuse of legitimate resources to send phishing scams seems to be the next trend, so be wary of any unexpected invoices you receive, even if they are from legitimate payment companies like PayPal, Venmo, Square, etc.
What can you do if you end up paying a fraudulent invoice through PayPal?
If you’ve received an invoice you think is fraudulent, you can report to the Resolution Center.
- Go to the Resolution Center.
- Click on “Report a Problem”.
- Select the fraudulent invoice you want to report.
- Click Continue.
- Follow the onscreen steps to report the issue.
Be aware that scammers are more and more abusing legitimate resources to try to steal your money. Don’t just blindly pay that invoice, stop and question, and don’t get scammed by a phishing email.
