GUYS: About that Election Day hacking... PLEASE BE ON ALERT.

[calimary]

calimary here. I do not know if this IS part of the results of that hacking, BUT:

I got an email this morning that alerted me that my PayPal account has been limited. It started asking for all the usual information of the kind you do NOT want to have hackers and other nogoodniks to have.

I became alarmed and called the PayPal people on our landline, according to the phone # on my monthly statement.

They looked into things and confirmed, yup, that email is from nogoodniks.

The reason I became alarmed and suspected a link to DU was because, immediately before Election Day, we were all advised that only star members could interact all day.

Of course, all day on Election Day, we were hobbled and silenced by hackers.

The day before, I decided to make sure my star membership was maintained, and made a small payment ... via PayPal.

PLEASE BE ON THE ALERT. I don't know if this has anything to do with the hacking, but it sure is suspicious, time-wise.

[Grey Lemercier]

1. PayPal phishing emails are legion for 15 plus years

I am very sure it had nothing to do with the hack.

[Lithos]

2. yeah

I was getting them years before I started using Paypal...

L-

[calimary]

3. Well, I never got one of those re: PayPal, til this morning.

Timing just smelled really fishy.

[Grey Lemercier]

5. your email has been turned out into the wild

No idea how, but all it takes is onetime for an email to get discovered, then it is recycled onto thousands of lists, some legal, some not.

That is where spam comes from.

[haele]

4. I got a PayPal notice too, but it was because my account was in reality linked to an expired card.

So when I paid for a star membership the day before, it didn't go through - I had to go to their website and update the card for payment to be processed.

I don't think your spam email had anything to do with the DU hack; I was getting multiple PayPal scam alerts two/three weeks ago (along with "United Credit Service" collection scam phone calls), so some boiler-room is probably cycling the latest scam through the WWW. 'Tis the season, and all. People are starting the holiday shopping, and a lot of online purchases are being made, so it's a ripe time for purchase alert scams.

Just remember never to click through the email to get to a site; open up a secure browser and log in directly at the PayPal site to find out if there is a problem with your account. I do the same thing with all my accounts - go directly to the site in a browser, not click on a link in an email.

If I receive any other notices that look phishy, I just forward them to PayPal's scam reporting site without opening them.

Haele

[SharonAnn]

6. About 10 hours after the DU hack I got an email from Google about my Gmail account

Someone from another location was trying to log into it. Suggested i change my password.

So, I went to Gmail and changed the password.

That's never happened before.

[Pathwalker]

7. Yahoo let someone from Germany log into my account,

THEN they notified me. This was after DU was hacked. Changed my passwords on a lot of accounts that had information on Yahoo. Totally pissed at Yahoo. "Oops, our bad."