<story><title>PayPal phishing scam uses invoices sent via PayPal</title><url>https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/08/paypal-phishing-scam-uses-invoices-sent-via-paypal/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ww520</author><text>It doesn&amp;#x27;t help that dark patterns used by well known websites normalizing the problems. That other day I got a credit card charge notification of $154 from my bank about a charge from Amazon. I didn&amp;#x27;t buy anything from Amazon recently. I also didn&amp;#x27;t get any email from Amazon about a bill or a purchase. Logged on to Amazon, looked through the order history, looked through AWS billing, and didn&amp;#x27;t see any recent charges. I thought my card was stolen and got a fraudulent charge.&lt;p&gt;By chance I looked into the Prime membership page. An obscure page listed the recent Prime charges. Yep, it&amp;#x27;s the Prime membership charge. The amount looked odd because tax was added to it, where the old charges were like $119 or $139. Amazon employs a dark pattern of not sending to the users any notification on the Prime renewal, no billing statement, no invoice, no email, just a silent charge on the credit card.&lt;p&gt;I promptly canceled my Prime membership, not for the money but for not rewarding dark pattern behaviors.</text></item><item><author>coldpie</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m frequently impressed with spammer ingenuity. We had a similar thing happen at a previous job. Users could sign up for a free trial for our software using a web form. The form had fields like &amp;quot;email address&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;name&amp;quot; so we could follow up with the user. Scammers would fill in a victim&amp;#x27;s email address and some scummy website in the &amp;quot;name&amp;quot; field, resulting in our servers sending the victim an email starting with something like, &amp;quot;Hello, Click Here For Free Money FreeMoney.com,&amp;quot; followed by the rest of our marketing copy. Never would&amp;#x27;ve thought to use the form that way...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>makeitdouble</author><text>That Prime silent charge problem is also problematic after credit card changes and other adjustments.&lt;p&gt;Saw the other day a charge get refused on a credit card I cancelled. 3DSecure is mandatory on it, so I kinda panicked thinking I got phished somewhere, but no, it was just Amazon reusing their authorization to charge a year later. I would have actually updated my info if I had a heads up, but now that my membership has been canceled following the charge refusal, it&amp;#x27;s kind of an occasion to let it go.</text></comment>
<story><title>PayPal phishing scam uses invoices sent via PayPal</title><url>https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/08/paypal-phishing-scam-uses-invoices-sent-via-paypal/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ww520</author><text>It doesn&amp;#x27;t help that dark patterns used by well known websites normalizing the problems. That other day I got a credit card charge notification of $154 from my bank about a charge from Amazon. I didn&amp;#x27;t buy anything from Amazon recently. I also didn&amp;#x27;t get any email from Amazon about a bill or a purchase. Logged on to Amazon, looked through the order history, looked through AWS billing, and didn&amp;#x27;t see any recent charges. I thought my card was stolen and got a fraudulent charge.&lt;p&gt;By chance I looked into the Prime membership page. An obscure page listed the recent Prime charges. Yep, it&amp;#x27;s the Prime membership charge. The amount looked odd because tax was added to it, where the old charges were like $119 or $139. Amazon employs a dark pattern of not sending to the users any notification on the Prime renewal, no billing statement, no invoice, no email, just a silent charge on the credit card.&lt;p&gt;I promptly canceled my Prime membership, not for the money but for not rewarding dark pattern behaviors.</text></item><item><author>coldpie</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m frequently impressed with spammer ingenuity. We had a similar thing happen at a previous job. Users could sign up for a free trial for our software using a web form. The form had fields like &amp;quot;email address&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;name&amp;quot; so we could follow up with the user. Scammers would fill in a victim&amp;#x27;s email address and some scummy website in the &amp;quot;name&amp;quot; field, resulting in our servers sending the victim an email starting with something like, &amp;quot;Hello, Click Here For Free Money FreeMoney.com,&amp;quot; followed by the rest of our marketing copy. Never would&amp;#x27;ve thought to use the form that way...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toomanydoubts</author><text>&amp;gt;I promptly canceled my Prime membership, not for the money but for not rewarding dark pattern behaviors.&lt;p&gt;Lucky you who was able to get through the dark patterns in the unsubscribe page. I got one extra charge because the first time I tried, I fell for one of their dark patterns and believed it was canceled while it wasn&amp;#x27;t.</text></comment>