Ministry of Propaganda

Ministry of Propaganda - 06/Apr/2005: "Dear Phisher,"

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Dear Phisher,

while I appreciate that you need to make a living by trying to con me out of my hard earned cash, I'm offended by the means you are using. How stupid do you think I am? Let me run you through all the mistakes you made:

Let me start with the e-mail address you sent your mail to. Someone (or was that you as well?) went harvesting a few e-mail addresses from the web. Among others they (or you?) found the address in the RSS feed from my travelogue and photo site. I can guarantee you, that's not the address I use for any real business. Or in other words: Dead giveaway #1 that your mail is fake.

What next? You write: We recently noticed one or more attempts to log in to your PayPal account from a foreign IP address and we have reasons to belive that your account was hijacked by a third party without your authorization. OK, first of all it is "believe", not "belive". Then, how do you authorise a hijacking? And finally, what's this nonsense about attempts to log in (i.e. nobody did log in) yet the account was "hijacked"? Nice attempt to scare me, only that it was useless. Or in other words: Dead giveaway #2 that your mail is fake.

Let's see what else we find. I would expect Paypal to send me to http://www.paypal.com/. Yet you try to send me to http://211.220.195.70/paypal/login.html (while you tried to mask the URL in the HTML e-mail my e-mail client still shows me where a link leads to). Running that IP-address through a few checks on DNSstuff.com provides interesting results: Whois tells me that you're in Korea while a reverse DNS lookup provides no results. Not exactly what you would expect from Paypal, don't you think? Somehow I doubt that Paypal would store their data in Korea on some dodgy server. Possible, but very unlikely. Or in other words: Dead giveaway #3 that your mail is fake.

More? OK, OK, here you go: If you choose to ignore our request, you leave us no choise but to temporaly suspend your account. Not again. You should really buy a dictionary. It's "choice", not "choise". And what is "temporaly"? Do you really think PayPal would send out something like that? Followed by this incomplete sentence The PayPal Team and put your pin code !? Or in other words: Dead giveaway #4 that your mail is fake.

I sincerely recommend that you change your profession to something different, something where even you might succeed. Whatever that might be.

With not so kind regards,

Disgruntled from Tunbridge Wells

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