Virus alert: Attention! Your PayPal account has been limited!

Strictly speaking this is not a virus, but a phishing attempt where the email is attempting to obtain the log on details for a users PayPal account.

The email is well worded and considerate in tones, apologising for any inconvenience. The even provides very good advice that you should not provide your details to fraudulent web sites. The email has legitimate links to the PayPal site in all but one case, which is the activate link. If you hover your mouse over the activate link you see it is not a PayPal site.

When we initially started to use PayPal these emails were a bit of a concern. No business wants to have their PayPal account suspended so it aims to put pressure on the PayPal user. Often in business we are under various pressures so one more pressure may lead to an error in judgement resulting in your account details being provided to a fraudulent web site.

As this email says, do not click on links in the email. Go to the PayPal site by typing in the PayPal address in the address bar of the browser.

Now if PayPal provided their own email service for messages and only contacted via their email service with a short alert email, then there would be little reason for concern. Any attempt to obtain details would be an obvious phishing attack.

This type of email cannot harm your computer. It is designed to trick you as phishing emails attempt to do. Only by being tricked can you cause harm.

We generally do not receive this type of email as we delete it from the mail server using OzEfilter. In this case we downloaded the email so we could review and report on the contents.

- Kelvin