How can I tell if my Paypal and eBay Alerts are legit or phishing?

You're right to be suspicious! These are indeed what us industry folk call phishing (rhymes with fishing): fake email messages purporting to be from legitimate sites, they redirect you to clones of the real site and their sole purpose is to get you to click on the link and log in to their mock sites.

These are bogus messages sent by online criminals.

This afternoon, I received a message that looks exactly like it came from Paypal. It had a Paypal return address, a legit looking case address, and even a link on the bottom to the Paypal privacy policy. In the middle was the important link, though: "To update your Paypal records, click on the following link:" followed by the link "https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run".

Or does it link there? HTML messages can easily point to one site while appearing to point to another. So I cracked open the message and read through the source, to find my suspicions confirmed. Rather than actually link to the Paypal site, this message points to the Web address http://147.46.36.234/verify/index.htm.

Then, from the Mac OS X command line, I tried to telnet to that host, to see what would happen and here's what I got:

$ telnet 147.46.36.234
Trying 147.46.36.234...
Connected to insdel.snu.ac.kr.
Escape character is '^]'.
Connection closed by foreign host.
$ 

Almost all of these phishing sites work the same way, taking you to Web sites referenced by number, with no domain name mentioned at all.

Since these criminals are "fishing" for account information (imagine the consequences of blindly entering your actual account and password information to their system!) these sort of scams that masquerade as real email from legitimate companies is now known as "phishing".

Some of these phishing messages are quite ingenious: I've received a wave of messages that appear to be a communication from a buyer on eBay who is just notifying me that they've paid me for an item they won on auction. The purpose of the message is for me to click the "reply" button, log in to "ebay" (it's not eBay, of course, it's the scam Web site collecting account information) and then doubtless get an error message to keep me from being too suspicious.

Here's how you can avoid being caught by these phishing messages: never click on a link in an email message. If you were to get a legit message from Paypal, eBay, Wells Fargo, Citibank, TCF, whomever, simply go to your Web browser and type in the address of the company Web site. Then log in as normal and check to see if there are any messages or other indications that there really is a problem. I'll bet that there isn't anything wrong at all.

After all, given how many of these annoying phishing messages are sent now, do you really think that these companies are going to send real messages and confuse their customers?