#Glener paypal invoice scam full

The issues start showing once you take a closer look.Īt the top, it says “PayPal User” instead of the account owner’s name. It came from their standard email address, has clickable links to appropriate areas on their website, and even mentions phishing and fraudulent email awareness at the bottom. But this is the first time I’ve ever received one and since it looks legitimate I figured it was worth covering.The email we received, seen above, appeared to be an invoice from PayPal. People have been sending out fake invoices for a while. Don’t use any email links to do so.Īnd there we have it. If you really want to get in touch with paypal: open your web browser and manually head to the site. Even if it is from, or appears to be from, a legitimate site. I know in this case we’re looking at a legit email, but never – ever click links in unexpected emails. There is a “contact us” link on this section as well. So when you get a fake invoice, you are safe to just delete it and move on. As stated before, paypal never auto-debits invoice payments. Now we’re back the legitimate part of the invoice email. They goal is to make you forgo talking to anyone else who might clue you in that you’re being scammed. This is the same as the Injured/Arrested Family Member scam. The scammer will say you have one or two hours to complete the transaction or you’ll be in serious trouble. We see this all the time in IRS or Arrest Warrant scams. The less time someone has to think about why what they’re seeing or hearing is bullshit, the more likely they are to fork over their cash.

Bonus Note: Scammers always like to attach a timeline to their scams.

The first being someone who just clicks “pay” and pays, the second being someone who panics and calls the “customer service” line. In this case, the scammer has created two separate chances to scam you. They call that number and end up talking to the scammer who is able to bilk money from them. If someone reads the email and panics, they see the customer service number conveniently provided in the email.

The number listed is not a paypal number at all.

Take note of the dual space on the comma between “transaction” and “please”. Scammer emails always have bad or incorrect grammar.

The scammer mistyped the amount and added a space between the decimal point and the cents.

It hasn’t been sent, despite what the scammer says. Secondly, the email already established earlier that this is a request for payment. (Especially when the email address attached doesn’t even have a paypal account).

“You sent a payment of-” First of all, Paypal doesn’t auto-debit any invoice from your account without authorization.

They are never addressed to “Dear Customer” or “Customer”.

#Glener paypal invoice scam full

Legitimate Paypal emails always contain your full name or alias.“Seller note to customer” is always from the seller and never from paypal.Here, the scammer uses the “note to customer” section of the invoice template to write up a paragraph that looks as though it came from Paypal. Typically, if a scammer is spoofing an email, hovering over these links will show their destination to be anything other than the legitimate website. Hovering over the “view and pay invoice” link shows a valid link to a paypal invoice payment page.A quick google search shows they’re a cryptocurrency company. I’ve blacked it out so that no one tries to be dumb. Invoice number is perfectly legitimate.In the actual body of the email, you’ll see it has changed to “Please pay your invoice”. Notice how in the subject line it says “you have paid an invoice”? That is a subject lane created by the scammer.

But here is where we start to notice a few things. Again, perfectly legitimate looking invoice email because it is a legitimate invoice email from paypal. Though the big clue here that this email was nonsense? The email address it was sent to has never been used for a paypal account or a paypal invoice service. But that isn’t the case here.īecause the scammers are using Paypal’s legitimate invoice service, the name and email server match up and are legitimate.

Typically, your spam filter will catch this and you’ll never see it. So first thing’s first - the main thing we always look at to see if an email is legit or not. But there’s some key changes here to help this scam along. What we have here is a scammer making use of paypal’s invoice system to send a fake invoice. Looks pretty legit doesn’t it? That’s because it is. Go ahead and take a look at the full thing, then we’ll break it down. Some of the info is blacked out intentionally (i.e. So I’m sitting at my desk doing some adulting, because what else do you do at your desk in the middle of the day, when I got this really weird, absolutely legitimate looking email.