Internet users are being warned about a scam involving the abuse of a legitimate website.  Beware of an urgent email from security @ PayPal.com, requesting personal information to update your account. The fraudulent message may take the following form:

"It has come to our attention that your eBay billing information records are out of date. It is necessary to update the billing information.  If you will please take 5-10 minutes out of your online experience to update your account records, you will not run into any future problems with eBay's online service.  However, failure to update your records will result in account termination.  Please update your account within 24 hours."

The provided link will display a web page that requests: username, password, email data, credit card numbers, bank account info and more. The presentation is extremely convincing using PayPal's graphics deep-linked from official PayPal servers and all links are programmed to show the PayPal.com URL in the browser status window upon mouse-over.   

The counterfeit webpage is not a secure page and the URL is a numerical IP to mask the identity, which goes to a bogus "elementary" school in Korea.

FBI Cybercrime confirms that this new scam is similar to one that previously masqueraded as AOL and several online service providers.  If you receive email that provides a link to a destination page requesting personal information, you should be very suspicious.  Generally, you should never provide your personal information unless you go to that service provider's site and physically log into your account with your user-name and password.

If you have any questions about this scam, please contact our Financial Crimes supervisor at 260-427-1201, Monday-Friday 08:00-16:00.

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