Did you get an invoice through Paypal, out of the blue, and from someone you have never heard of, and maybe even for $0 dollars? Odds are that if you did, you were on the receiving end of the newest engine for sending spam: Paypal (and odds are also good that it advertised Jaboo or skrylcomputers.com).
Of course, Paypal isn’t the only invoice generation service that provides space to add a note in the invoice – in fact most, if not all of them do. However, Paypal does have a few things going for it:
- It’s basically free to use
- It’s essentially free
- (And this is a big one) The odds that the spam Paypal invoice will go to someone who actually has a Paypal account and so will open and read it are very good, as so many people use Paypal
How the Paypal $0 Scam Spam Invoice Works
The spammer sends you the $0 invoice through Paypal, costing them $0, and a) ensuring that they aren’t accused of trying to bilk you out of money, and b) intriguing you enough to read the invoice.
Then, in the ‘comments’ section of the invoice, they include the text of their spam.
Here is a regular, real Paypal invoice:
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See where it says “Thank you for your membership”? The person sending the invoice can type anything they want in there – anything at all.
The Paypal $0 Invoice Spam
The first example of this in the wild (at least that we could find) arrived at the OpenInboxExperiment on January 1st, 2016. In this case, the spam text reads:
“Good day, become our family memeber, shop cheap electronics online with us. Please, do not hesitate to visit our online store & sub. skrylcomputers.com Cheap, quality and brand new electronics. Good prices & 3% discount. Cheap electronics.”
Security writer and speaker Troy Hunt received a similar $0 invoice, also featuring Jaboo, and skrylcomputers.com, but with different wording (likely to evade Paypal’s spam detection system), during that same week.
The version that Troy received says “Good day, become our family memeber (sic), buy cheap electronics online with us. Please, do not hesitate to visit our online store & subscribe. skrylcomputers.com Cheap, quality and brand new electronics. Good prices & 3% discount.”
Not surprisingly, Jaboo (or Ja boo) Computers and Skrylcomputers.com are one and the same.
Skrylcomputers.com is registered out of Mazowieckie (also spelled Masoweckie), Poland.
Anyways, you can safely ignore this invoice.
Let us know if you received this same $0 Paypal invoice, or something similar!
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My bank account shows two payments:
Paypal *lespeedtech 4029357733 HK £17.45
Paypal *lespeedtech 4029357733 HK £34.83
I have not ordered anything from Paypal.
Can yo please help?