I received this ‘phishing’ scam in my inbox this morning. It’s supposed to be from Paypal, and the ‘hook’ is that my account has been limited or suspended. When I looked at the email more closely, however, I noticed that:

• the sender was NOT from Paypal
• the email did NOT address me by name
• and the whole email was funneling me towards the big, blue link you can see below

Seems pretty obvious, right?

Actually, despite having seens hundreds of these scam emails in my time, I still felt a moment of fright when I read this one. Why? Because I use Paypal for most of my online purchases, so the threat of having that service removed hit me where I live.

Unfortunately, that moment of fright is exactly what makes phishing email scams work. The scammers send out millions of these emails at random in the hope that a…