On Thursday, netizens began receiving a convincing forgery of a PayPal e-mail, with the subject line "PayPal Verification" and the false return address verification@paypal.com.

The text of the message claims that PayPal -- owned by online auctioneer eBay -- has launched an anti-fraud initiative that requires the recipient to verify their account information on a particular website, "as part of our continuing commitment to protect your account."

Clicking on the supplied link -- masked as a PayPal URL -- takes the user to paypal.un-fraud.com. The website, hosted by Verio, consists entirely of a professional-looking "Personal Account Identity Verification" page that asks the user for their name, address, birth date, credit card numbers, social-security number, mother's maiden name, checking account numbers and ATM codes.

Read more: The Register.

"eBay" sends these fake emails all the time.

I say "eBay", because that is what they pretend to be and ask for your personal information.

I'm very disappointed that the majority of fake emails are CLEARLY fake.. Huge mispellings and obvious grammatical errors. It's embarrasing to think someone could get away with that.

Oh yeah, I get this sort of stuff daily in my inbox. It is a shame, because I know that they are actually getting people to respond to it