There is a phishing campaign with PayPal messages trying to steal your account credentials and other sensitive information that could be used for identity theft.
When PayPal detects suspicious or fraudulent activity on an account, the status will be set to ‘restricted’, which will place temporary restrictions on the withdrawal, transmission or receipt of money.
A new SMS smishing campaign pretends to come from PayPal, declaring that your account is permanently restricted unless you verify your account by clicking on a link.
PayPal: We have permanently restricted your account. Click on the link below to verify ‘, reads the text message.
By clicking on the embedded link, you will be taken to a phishing page asking you to log in to your account, as shown below.
When you log on to the phishing page, the imported PayPal credentials are sent to the threat actors. The phishing page then goes a step further as it will try to gather further details about you including your name, date of birth, address, banking details, and more.
The information collected is used to carry out identity theft attacks, to gain access to your other accounts, or to carry out targeted spearfishing attacks.
Yesterday, two other people I know received these phishing texts, so this is a very active campaign and everyone should pay attention to these messages.
Smishing scams are becoming more and more popular, so it is important to consider text messages with links as suspicious. As with all phishing emails, never click on suspicious links, but go to the domain of the main website to confirm if there is a problem with your account.
What should you do if you enter information at this link?
If you received this text and incorrectly logged in to your PayPal account or provided other information, you should immediately go to Paypal.com and change your password.
If you use the same password on other sites, you will need to change it there as well.
Finally, you should be on the lookout for other targeted fishing campaigns using the submitted data. BleepingComputer also suggests that you monitor your credit report to make sure fraudulent accounts are not created under your name.
To prevent identity theft, you can also temporarily freeze your credit report to prevent banks and other companies from issuing credit under your name.