Day in the Life of an Idiot

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comicgeekscomicgeek:

kerryweaverlesbian:

dduane:

That “Pending PayPal Charge” Email Is a Scam — Even Though It Really Came From PayPal

Don’t get caught off guard by this. It’s quite a slick one.

What to actually do

If you get one of these, the answer is boring and it works every time:
Don’t call the number. Don’t reply. Don’t click links in the email — not even the unsubscribe link. Open a fresh browser tab, type paypal.com yourself, and log into your account. Check your activity. You’ll see either nothing, or a tiny incoming payment from a stranger that you can ignore.

Then forward the original email as an attachment to phishing@paypal.com and delete it. If you want to go a step further, report the phone number to the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov — every report makes it slightly harder for these operations to keep running.

And if you’ve already called? Don’t beat yourself up — these scams are designed by professionals to fool smart people. Hang up, run a malware scan if you installed anything they asked you to install, change your PayPal and bank passwords from a different device, and call your bank’s real fraud line (the number on the back of your card) to flag your accounts. Move fast, but you don’t need to panic.

from the above linked article. For the UK the email to forward phishing scams to is report@phishing.gov.uk, texts can be forwarded on to 7726 (for free!) and as a victim of fraud you can report it here (or here for Scotland)

— If an email recently landed in your inbox with a subject line like “Pending charge of USD 987.90 for account activation. Questions? Call (855) 629-1161” — don’t call that number. Don’t click anything. And whatever you do, don’t panic-dial to “stop the charge.”

You’re being targeted by one of the cleverest scams going right now, and the reason it works is uncomfortable: the email genuinely came from PayPal.

The trick is in the subject line, not the email

When most people think “phishing email,” they picture sketchy senders, broken English, and links to weird domains. This scam is the opposite. The email passes every authenticity check — SPF, DKIM, DMARC, all green. It comes from PayPal’s actual mail servers. The fonts are right. The footer is right. The unsubscribe link works. If you forwarded it to a security expert and asked “is this really from PayPal?” they’d have to say yes.

So how is it a scam?

Scammers have figured out that PayPal lets anyone send small amounts of money to anyone else, and that PayPal will dutifully email the recipient a notification. The scammer sends you a payout of, say, one Hungarian forint — about a quarter of a cent. PayPal’s system then automatically generates and sends you a real, legitimate, fully-authenticated email confirming the transaction.

Here’s the catch: the email’s subject line is whatever the scammer typed when they set up the payout. PayPal doesn’t sanitize it. So they write something terrifying like “Pending charge of USD 987.90 — call this number with questions” and PayPal’s servers cheerfully deliver that subject line straight to your inbox, wrapped in a perfectly legitimate-looking notification.

The actual transaction in the email body is for 1 forint. There is no $987.90 charge. There never was. But by the time most people read carefully enough to notice that, they’ve already dialed the number. —

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plaidadder:

plaidadder:

plaidadder:

Oh damn, I’ve almost missed celebrating May 4, Reichenbach Falls Day!

So many years, so many different Reichenbach headcanons, some of them mutually incompatible. For instance, long before I actually wrote H/W I had it firmly fixed in mind that during the Hiatus, Watson traveled to Reichenbach every May and spent the 4th hiking to the falls and crying into them. 

Here’s a list with links to most of the stuff I’ve written about Reichenbach over the past…25-odd years. Enjoy.

ACD CANON

H/W

O Paradis  Alone in a deteriorating hotel in Florence, Holmes commits to paper the true story of what really happened at Reichenbach and how he and Watson lost each other.

Meta:

The Man on the Tor: The Hound of the Baskervilles and the Hiatus.  In which I argue that for emotional purposes, the post-Reichenbach reunion actually happens in Hound of the Baskervilles and not in “The Empty House.”

The Perennial Problem  Review of the Granada Holmes “Final Problem.”

This Is Indeed Like The Old Days Review of Granada Holmes “Empty House”

Death is Always With Us  In which I look at the Granada Holmes “Devil’s Foot” as a way of excavating and working through the Reichenbach trauma

SHERLOCK

Johnlock:

Empty Houses  My post-Reichenbach reunion fic, written during the S2-S3 gap.

Meta:

It’s All True: Rereading “The Reichenbach Fall”

The Reichenbach Retcon

Faints and Feints: the Granada “Empty House” vs. Sherlock’s “The Empty Hearse”

Ah, Reichenbach. So hard on Watson and on all of us, and yet so undeniably important to the enduring appeal of the story and the characters.

May the fourth be with you…and may you slip from your arch-nemesis’s grasp just in time to save yourself from plunging into that dreadful chasm!

It’s May 4th again! For a limited time!

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