04/25/2021
Fake email, alert! This is the classic spam that is both easy to catch and difficult to detect at the same time. It appears to be from you're payment gateway, in this example Pay Pal. It is a subtle alert that your account has been "limited/restricted". When you open the email, the hacker knows you are active, they receive an open alert. Because you are desperate to know what happened you proceed to click through to a link that still looks like your payment gateway. Unfortunately if you put in your login and password information, they have now stolen your data 😥.
Prevention: most email accounts use "Preheaders". They are a few words and sometimes a sentence telling you what is inside the email, in addition to the subject line. Once you gather the subject line and preheader information, there is no need to open the email and read further. I recommend opening a separate browser independent of the email and logging in directly to your payment gateway. The service provider always has a notification area where important information is sent. If the same info isn't there you just experienced a hacking attempt and successfully avoided it.
A 2nd option to prevention: If you happen to open the email is to verify the address it was sent FROM. This is a little bit more difficult for the novice but with practice you can familiarize yourself with what official email address look like.
Pay Pal's Official Help Page on the issue below.
https://www.paypal.com/us/smarthelp/article/how-to-spot-fake,-spoof,-or-phishing-emails-faq2340
