According to a report out today from anti-virus vendor Sophos, eBay and PayPal phishing emails have dropped significantly in the past year. A year ago nine out of ten spoof emails were targetting either PayPal or eBay, today it’s down to one in five.
Graham Cluley of Sophos explained “PayPal and eBay users are much less likely to be targeted by virtual muggers, in part due to the efforts the firms have made in educating their customers about what to look out for, and how to protect themselves. The phishers are not turning away from their life of crime, however. They are now turning to a bigger pool of potential victims.”
Whilst eBay and PayPal users are much more aware of phishing emails the fraudsters are simply turning to other companies to target. Smaller credit card companies, online retailers and companies in specific geographic regions are more likely to be the target of phishing today.
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Most of the ones I receive now are for Natwest Bank, although the occasional eBay/Paypal one still comes through.
Interesting – however as the research appears to be based on percentage of total phishing emails rather than absolute numbers (and are they counting individual emails received, or just different types of email), not clear whether the actual number has gone up, down or stayed the same.
That’s my boring pedantic comment for the day!
They made this announcement a week a so ago that they were teaming up to fight the phishing problem, if it actually is this effective I wonder why they waited so long to put this in place? This problem has been going on for a long time now, guess if they could have done it sooner they would have, but I am all for getting less phishing junk for sure.
This is probably slanted – I don’t report phishing emails to the ebay/PP security centres, I just delete them. I may get about one every few weeks. So imagine how many people out there still get the emails and don’t report them.
We continue to get around 10 per HOUR for both eBay and PayPal. We’ve given up sending them to spoof@…. whereas once upon a time we forwarded all of them – that was in the days when we got one or two a day.
I guess the more your email addresses get known, the more mails you receive.