Henrietta / July 8th, 2008 at 8:03 am

The simplest, safest and most secure way to put an end to PayPal phishing would be for PayPal to cease putting clickable links in emails. Any customer communication requiring input from customers should be on the secure site.

“You have a message from PayPal which requires response, please log in to your account to access it.”

Patricia1 / July 8th, 2008 at 12:14 pm

I’d be happy if they’d just recognize what is phishing and what isn’t. I received an 11.50 payment from Squidoo – apparently it was from Google ads on my Squidoo page (which I was not aware of). I sent it to Paypal and they wrote back that it was, indeed, a phishing email and they would work hard to nab these evil-doers. Well, thankfully I remembered to go back to Squidoo and look in my account – there it was – $11.50 waiting to go to my Paypal account the minute I give them the right email address for it! So much for Paypal doing its job!

Andy Geldman / July 9th, 2008 at 7:43 am

Phishing detection, like Spam detection, is an inexact discipline. There is always the risk of false positives (as reported by Patrica above) as well some malicious emails failing to get caught.

It’s been a long time since Bill Gates predicted the death of spam (he said in 2004 it would be eradicated by 2006!), but a proper technology-based solution is still nowhere in sight.

So come on technology companies, give us a modern email system!