This is what is known as "phishing". They tend to target banks and Paypal. NEVER click on a link from even a seemingly official looking email from your financial institution. If you follow the instructions in the email, you're bank account will be drained and you may even become a victim of identity theft.
These scams are being run by organized crime gangs primarily in Russia and east Europe. The emails are sent from networks of infected home PC's. Keep your antivirus up to date, run updates for your favorite operating system in a timely fashion, and make sure there is a firewall on your broadband connection. Otherwise it's only a matter of time before you will be contributing to the problem. An unprotected PC on broadband will, on average, be infected in about 12 min. If you use Microsoft Windows, I recommend using Mozilla Thunderbird for your email client. Not only does it have excellent junk mail filtering, it will also warn you if you click on a link in an email that it flags as suspicious. The upcoming IE7 and Firefox 2.0 will both have phishing site detection capabilities when released (towards the end of the year). In the meantime, you still have a much lower chance of infection by NOT using Internet Explorer - use Firefox or Opera instead. If you need a nearly spam-free email environment, try gmail. Loran On Mar 21, 2006, at 7:53 AM, tim wrote: > Sorry if I sent this twice but not sure which phono-l address to use > I recently received email stating it was from paypal wanting me to > click on a link and log in because my account had been locked. I > went to the paypal site > and loged in and found out that it was not locked so I reported it to > [email protected].
