![]() ![]() The second is to not trust what is stated within the email, and instead go check directly on the official PayPal website. The first, of course, is to check the URLs of the links the email invites you to click on, because if they are external to PayPal they are clearly dubious. Trend Micro adds other suggestions for how best to defend oneself. Nonetheless, the fact remains that the moment PayPal appears to be requesting payment from outside its platform, one can be sure that it is a scam. By sending huge amounts of spam emails to a very large audience, it is not unlikely that some of the recipients already have some form of contract or service provision in place that could justify a request for payment. Indeed, one of the features that sometimes make these attempts effective is that the invoice sent would appear to have to do with a commonly used service, or well-known brands. The effectiveness of the scamĪs strange as it may seem that such a scam could work, scammers are often ingenious and know well the vulnerabilities of their potential victims. It has already happened several times that various scammers have been framed in this way when trying to sell their cashed cryptocurrencies to exchange them for fiat currencies or stablecoins. Typically the main mistake is to move them to a centralized exchange with a KYC requirement because in this case, the exchange’s internal wallet to which they are moved has associated the name and surname of a supposedly real person. However, investigators can publicly track any subsequent movements of the tokens once they have been sent to the public addresses listed in the scam emails, in the hope that the scammers will sooner or later make some mistake that makes them detectable. The scammers are counting on this very fact that it is not possible for investigators to figure out who is behind these scam attempts. Since the public addresses of crypto wallets are anonymous, it is not possible to know to whom the cryptocurrencies would actually be sent. Therefore the very moment a payment is requested outside of their platform it is very much certain that it is a scam attempt. What one should know is that all payments and all transactions involving PayPal take place only ever within their platform. In other words, as soon as the email indicates an address outside PayPal as the public address to send cryptocurrencies to, it is 100% sure that it is a scam attempt already. Recognizing the scam involving Bitcoin and PayPal Invoiceįortunately, it is very easy to recognize these scams.Īlthough the sender may look like PayPal, it is actually known that PayPal does not allow cryptocurrency payments on external wallets. Instead, the PayPal Invoice pro-forma doesn’t even exist, and there is only a request for payment from the scammers, who will obviously collect whatever they are paid. The email obviously contains payment details, so the person who receives it might actually think that someone has sent them an invoice from PayPal to pay. As a matter of fact, virtually anyone who wants to can send any email with any sender’s address. In fact, there are easy-to-implement and easy-to-use technologies that allow emails to be sent by entering an email address at the sender’s convenience, so in fact anyone can easily send an email with as the sender’s address. In reality, the real sender is not, and the email is not sent from PayPal’s servers or computers whatsoever. In fact, it is perpetrated simply by sending a fake email with sender asking for a payment in cryptocurrencies. Recognizing the scam involving Bitcoin and PayPal Invoiceįrom a strictly technical point of view, the scam is very trivial.
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