I just received a spam message, allegedly sent by someone in California, offering to send my advertising messages to 44,000,000 verified PayPal account holders.

The whole thing sounds very plausible and attractive, and I’m sure the spammer will make a lot of money from the mindless morons who take up the offer without thinking about it, other than to see dollar signs and overnight success.

WARNING!

This is a SCAM, and falling for it could cost you not only the money you pay to the spammer, but your Internet access, your PayPal account, your email service and your assets — including your home, cars and business.

How do I know it’s a scam?

Apart from long experience exposing scams and scammers, there are plenty of tell-tale warning signs and plain, common sense reasons why this is NOT legitimate. Here’s a short list of a few of them…

• Nobody but PayPal has access to that many of its account holders’ details. And certainly not legally or legitimately. If they do exist, they’ve been stolen. More likely, this is just a professional spammer (criminal!) re-branding his existing database as a list of PayPal account holders on the basis that so many people have PayPal accounts that there’s a fair chance that many of the addresses on his database are actually PayPal addresses.The one thing you CAN be 100% sure of is that PayPal has NOT provided them!
• Spammers are all thieves and liars. They lie to the recipients of their spam messages, they lie to their customers, and they lie to their prospective victims. They steal email addresses and other elements of identities, they steal bandwidth, they steal access to thousands of computers harnessed into their botnets (via trojans attached to emails, music downloads, games and other freebies — is your computer safe?).
• Spammers use false addresses to hide their identities. Take a look at this screen capture of the email message I just received… then check out the Google Map street photos of the senders alleged address.

Photos of 24052 Eucalyptus Ave, Moreno Valley, California:

The Bottom Line: Don’t deal with people offering you these kinds of deals. They WILL land you in trouble and cost you plenty.