Hey, hepcats. This is a public service announcement. If you get a strangely formatted/worded and/or unexpected email from the likes of PayPal, be careful. I just got a bona-fide phishing email. Subject: Notification of PayPal Limited Account Access. It actually links through to a site based out of Taiwan.

Phishing is the natural confluence of Spam and Scam: 1000s of emails go out which are formatted to appear to be legitimate communications from a company which you may be getting some service from. They link through to painstaking mockups of what the legit site actually looks like, but their only purpose is to get you to devulge your logins, passwords, credit card info, etc.

If you want to get smart about this sort of thing, here's a good online quiz which will show you some things to look for.

Remember: watch the URLs. If you click a link and see you're being redirected to something phishy like a numerical IP address or a domain you don't recognize, don't give up your info and contact the legit customer support center to let them know what's up. If you experience this w/paypal, you can forward the scammy email to spoof (at) paypal.com