Nowadays, you have to be very careful of what comes into your inbox. There are fraudulent emails that claims to be or poses as legitimate companies, but are really frauds. These are known as spoof emails.

As an example, below is a fraudulent email that claims to be from PayPal, but is really from a fraud. Don't get me wrong, PayPal is a fine company and there is nothing wrong with having a PayPal account. However, spammer and frauds often do target popular companies. It is very easy for spammer or fraudulent entities to pose as PayPal and trick you into enter personal information or clicking on nefarious links.

This is an example of a fraudulent PayPal email that attempts to pose as PayPal and why it is a fraud email...

The main clue that indicates that this email is fraudulent is that it did not address me by my real name. Real PayPal emails will always addresses you with your real name. However, just because an email addresses you by your real name does not necessarily mean that it is legitimate.

Even though the From address of [email protected] appears to be correct and in fact legitimate email does sometime come from [email protected], this email was definitely NOT sent by PayPal. It is very easy for programmer to send out an email with a fake from address.

Do NOT click on those blue links shown in the above fraudulent email. Although the domain of https://www.paypal.com looks correct, that is only for show. If you had clicked on them, that is definitely NOT where you will end up.

Do a view source of the email by right-clicking on your email and selecting context menu as shown above. You will see that the link real takes you to a very bad place.

That is why you should not click on links; they can take you to places that you do not want to go. Instead, it is safer to type the url manually in your browser.

Read all of PayPal's notices about protecting your account. The real PayPal would never ask for your password, so it's never okay to give out your password. Here is an eBay tutorial on how to protect yourself against spoof emails.