Genuine PayPal emails with spoof URLs

by Chris Dawson

This post was written in October 2007; specific information contained within it may be out of date.

PayPal emails are corrupt this morning. They are arriving for valid transactions with the PayPal URL replaced by an error. The links in the email including picture links all refer to https://SECURE.UNINITIALIZED.REAL.ERROR.COM/uk/vst/id=xx

PayPal email error
Although disconcerting it appears simply to be an email error. The payments are real payments for real transactions and logging into my PayPal account shows that the funds really have been paid.

It has to be more than a little embarrassing for PayPal just as the number of phishing emails are falling and they’ve implemented domain keys to then insert a load of dodgy URLs into their payment notification emails.

Tags for this post: , ,
Author: Chris Dawson
Posted at: Friday, October 19th, 2007 at 8:35 am
Filed Under Uncategorized
 

Comments

5 Responses to “Genuine PayPal emails with spoof URLs”

  1. Steve H on October 19th, 2007 8:42 am

    This has been happening for about 2 weeks now. When you look at the affected transactions from within Paypal, all have the user’s email in place of the eBay user id for some reason.

  2. Chris Dawson on October 19th, 2007 9:28 am

    It’s not the user id/email address that’s the problem, it’s the fact it’s a totally incorrect URL - that’s only appeared this morning :-(

  3. Allotment on October 19th, 2007 11:50 am

    Steve is right, It has been happeing for a couple of weeks on a small percentage of payment emails (missing id and incorrect URL). I reported it to PayPal when I got the first one, have heard nothing since but still continue to receive them…

  4. Allotment on October 19th, 2007 11:51 am

    I think it started soon after their announcement re Domain keys..

  5. Sue Bailey on October 21st, 2007 1:07 pm

    Like Steve, I’ve been getting the secure.uninitialised etc. thing for a couple of weeks, but it appears to be fixed this morning.

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