Recently, there has been a new PayPal email scam going around,
but this one is really tricky because these scammers are able to actually generate
an email coming from Paypal.com, actually. It's not some random domain or look-alike domain,
it literally comes from Paypal.com. So in this video, I'll explain how they accomplish this,
what to do to watch out for it and defend yourself.
And of course, what their goal is, like how does the scam actually
proceed if you were to fall for it. Before we continue, as a reminder,
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Okay so first let's go over how this scam works. So first of all, the victim is going to receive
an email from PayPal saying you have an invoice for some amount. And the email,
like I mentioned, is actually from service@paypal.com. So if you were
to follow the usual advice to check the domain, make sure it's actually from them,
none of that would work because it actually comes from PayPal and you would have to fall back
on just general common sense and skepticism. In this example, it says there's a invoice for $600
due, and it says "Billing Department of PayPal updated your invoice". It also says "seller note
to customer" with a whole thing about how your account was used to buy a Walmart gift card,
and if you wanna dispute it, here's the number to call for customer service. And
there's also a button to "View and Pay Invoice". And that actually does
go to paypal.com and brings up a legitimate PayPal, well not legitimate,
but an actual PayPal invoice. But here's the thing, all of this is just made up,
and actually their goal is not even to necessarily get you to pay that amount.
It's actually to get you to call that fake customer service number. But I'm getting a bit
ahead of myself, let me explain how they actually made this invoice. The thing to understand
is anybody, even you, can log into your PayPal account and create an invoice, a PayPal invoice.
In fact, if you go to the top of PayPal and click "Send and Request" on the right side, you see an
option to "Send an Invoice". And then you can just fill out a bunch of info saying whatever you want,
and this is what the scammers did. Notice how on the scam email, it doesn't even say the person's
name, it just says PayPal User. They're just blasting this out to a whole bunch of people, not
targeting any specific person. On the right, you can see how you can choose
any logo to add to the invoice and even edit the business info to say whatever you want.
And they changed it to just say "PayPal Billing Department". For
items where it says "Walmart eGift Card" with a bunch of details, like a transaction ID,
it's all fake to look legitimate. They just added that to the Description field
of that item in the invoice. And that whole message in the email that talks
about how "there's evidence that your PayPal account has been accessed".
They just wrote that themselves in the "seller note to customer" field. So all of this is
made up by the scammer. Now, I don't know if they generate a new invoice for each individual person,
or if PayPal lets you send it out to multiple people, I assume. But either way, each person
gets a actual email generated from PayPal because of this fake invoice that gets made.
And despite them sending you a invoice through PayPal, they're not actually expecting you
to pay it. I guess theoretically, if you were to so say, "oh I guess I owe this money" and
click it and pay, yeah it would go to their scam account. But they're actually hoping that you
are going to try and dispute it by calling one of the fake customer service numbers,
either listed in the email in that seller note to customer, or under the
item description that they also put in. According to one article by Brian Krebs,
he's a security researcher, if you call the number, they basically
eventually try to get you to download a remote administration tool like TeamViewer or AnyDesk,
which lets them control your computer. They basically tell you to go to some
website they set up, that's meant to look like some kind of support website, generic.
And if you go to the support section of it,
they have all these "oh, support tools, blah, blah, blah". But literally they just
go to download TeamViewer or these programs, they have you install it, and tell you, "oh yeah,
we're gonna help you fix it". And then they do all sorts of different stuff. But it's all fake.
And if you do end up doing that, they have a whole variety of tricks they can play on you to
get money out of you. A lot of times they'll just bring up the command prompt, run some command that
looks complicated and say, "oh, look at all these viruses you have" and stuff like that,
it's a bunch of nonsense. Many times they'll have you log into your bank account.
And what they'll do is they'll trick you into thinking they sent you some amount of money as
a refund, by transferring money between your own two accounts. And then they'll edit the screen
so it looks like you received a refund transfer, but literally it was your own money. And they'll
also say, "Oh no, I made a mistake or you made a mistake and I transferred way too much money.
I'm gonna lose my job. Please send the money back", and that's how they get you.
They trick you into thinking they sent you too much money and try to get you to refund
the extra back. But really they didn't send you anything, you're just sending
money away. And the way they'll get the money out of you, is there's a few different ways.
One is a common one, they'll try to get you to go to buy gift cards at the CVS. Sometimes they will
tell you to go to the bank and wire money somewhere,
sometimes they can even blank the screen out and try to see if they can
transfer money directly from your bank account themselves while controlling the computer,
and you can't even see it. Sometimes they can't do that because it requires like verification codes
from the bank and they don't want to bother with that, so that's why they try to get you to
buy gift cards or go to the bank and transfer it,
where there's no way to undo it. And in regards to these types of scams, I would definitely recommend
another YouTuber Kitboga, who basically messes with these types of scammers, pranks
'them, wastes their time. It's hilarious to see them get really angry. So while it's entertaining,
you can also see how these scams work, how they try to trick people.
So once you see a few of these, it's a pretty standard script they follow,
and you can see patterns. So it's hilarious, and you can learn a lot.
So I'll maybe put a link to one of those popping out there. A needless to say in
general, if you're calling customer support about some kind of financial transaction,
there is no reason that they should tell you to download something, it's a bunch of nonsense. And
really, if you get any kind of notification, or email, or popup telling you to contact
customer support, and then they try to get you to download something, that is a massive red flag.
It's one of the most common scams in the book these days. Anyway, just be aware of this scam,
that way you won't have to worry about it, you won't fall for it if you know
how it works. If you guys enjoyed this video, give a thumbs up of course, for the algorithm. Again,
if you wanna subscribe, also be sure to click the bell to enable notifications.
If you guys wanna keep watching, the next video I'd recommend is
one I made of another type of new email scam that's becoming way more
popular. So much so that the FBI issued a warning about it. So I'll put that link
right there. So thanks so much for watching guys, and I'll see you in the next video.