Goddamn Phishers
Apparently phishing e-mails from paypal.at are currently really “in”. I got one last Thursday (to my Austrian university e-mail account) and didn’t think much of it. The fake site was still up and running when I tried it out. Curious computer geek that I am, I had to investigate, of course. I checked to see where the server running the fake PayPal site was hosted and it turned out to be Vanderhoof, BC of all places. I am pretty sure they got hacked and the owner of the server had no idea that his site was hosting fake PayPal pages. I reported the site to PayPal, because what else am I going to do.
I find another e-mail with very similar content in my spam folder this morning. Either I didn’t notice last time or maybe the pages were in English then (I really couldn’t say), but today I realized how awfully wrong the German text on their web-site is. They are trying to convince you that a payment needs to be cancelled (and they’re just rambling on about it), so you have to enter all your information. The usual.
Sentence structure and vocabulary are all wrong, the scam so obvious that I am wondering how desparate somebody needs to get to try and pull off a scam that bad.
Wichtige Nachricht - Bitte bestätigen der Rückerstattungantrag für die Zahlung an DELL INSPERATION E1505 , durch das Durchführen der folgenden erforderlichen Details. Dieses ist sicherzustellen daß dein Rückerstattungantrag echt ist. Alles fängt in fettem sind vorgeschrieben auf.
Sounds like they ran an English text through babelfish or something. “Schuldpostenkarte”?! What the hell’s that? Probably their attempt to litterally translate debit card, I would guess. Doesn’t work that way, sorry guys.
Deine Karte Informationen eintragen - PayPal empfiehlt sich, eine Schuldpostenkarte anstelle von einer Kreditkarte zu verwenden, wegen des höheren Sicherheit Niveaus von diesen. Es ist immer sicher, die Schuldpostenkarte zu benutzen, die mit deinem Scheckkonto verbunden wird, das z.Z. zu deinem PayPal Konto angebracht wird.
My absolute favorite is their submit button at the end of the page that reads “Antrag Restätigen”. Yeah, sure. That’s like saying “Bubmit application”. Who clicks on that?
Makes me almost feel sorry for the idiots staging this. ALMOST. I’d still like to give them a good kick in the butt (or some other area nearby) for being scumbags. — Come to think of it, they should actually have to serve extra time for being so stupid.
