I received the following email today:

From: Paypal Manager <pp-money@paypal.com>
Reply-To: pp-money@paypal.com
To: xxxxx@easywebnospam.co.uk
Subject: You received Money !

User junoltd@hotmail.com just send $234.00 USD to you:
Paypal UserID: junoltd
Transaction#: 2856-SP92-16971
Date: 05-12-2003
Comments: Your accout #315191 was selected to receive this months bonus.

We are using Paypal for our payouts. The commission for this service ($27.00) is already deducted from the total bonus payout. Your e-mail address is not associated with Paypal. You have to apply for new account in order to receive your funds. There is additional $50 which you can receive if you add debit card to your account and it is issue from the following banks or their branches: Fleet Boston, Citibank, Banknorth, Suntrust, Chemical, Commerce and M&I. Your card will not be charged, it is used to receive funds from our service. Once you register, the money will appear in your Paypal's account balance in your overview page. You can withdraw the outstanding balance to your debt card's bank account that you added during the registration process. To creat a new Account and to receive Money, Please go to our new created Website :
http://www.paypal-identity.com Dont forget, we value our commitment to answer your query as soon as possible.
Sincerely,
Your Customer Support
If you have any Questions about the Paypal Service, Please go to our SecurityCenter:
http://www.paypal-identity.com/security-center.html

This is transparently an attempt to get me to reveal my PayPal login details, so that the crooks can clean out my account (and credit card).

Important Message

If you receive anything resembling this,

1. Do not visit the link.
2. Do not give out any details
3. Do report it to spoof@paypal.com. You'll get a message back pretty quickly from a real person using their email response system (it will have a tracking ID in the subject, along the lines of KMM38976571V82218L0KM which lets them tie up any response you send back to your original report).

Read on for some of the indicators that this is an obvious fraud attempt.

The Hook

Ooh look - someone I've never heard of is sending me over USD$200 for no readily apparent reason. Surely they're genuine... No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus. This is very much like the appeal to greed exploited by 419 scammers.

The Misdirection

Fake user ID

Fake Transaction ID

Fake Account ID

"Upfront and honest" mention of commission already taken (way more than PayPal actually charge anyway).

Link to a "newly created" fake lookalike site. You haven't heard of it, so it must be newly created, right?

Lookalike site has a plausible "security center" page... plausible because it's a duplicate of the genuine PayPal fraud prevention page only with the addition of the fake site to the list of "genuine" URLs

Mention of real big-name banks

The Take

They're trying to get me to enter my PayPal details into a completely separate website, under the guise of "re-registering". I've already registered fully, so I'm not falling for that one. The site happens to include the word 'paypal' in the domain name. Let's look at what Paypal's real site says:

If we require information from you, we will notify you in an email and request that you enter the information only after you have securely logged in to your PayPal account from https://www.paypal.com/.

The Double Whammy

Notice the attempt to get me to add a debit card, so they can clean out my main bank account too? Adding a further $50 incentive and mentioning lots of big name banks is supposed to reassure me that I'm really, really safe. Honest, guv.

The Killer Errors

Paypal would never send an email like this, because:

1. They always address you by name
2. They only ever ask you for other details than your login once you've securely logged into https://www.paypal.com/ (the 'https' means that it's encrypted).
3. The poor spelling and punctuation.