Yes, I had the same problem! In fact, the text underneath the GIF file
was in white text. I only discovered it when I highlighted it, and it
appeared to be a part of a historical essay or something. Mostly
gibberish, but it had dates such as 1853, etc. I ended up just copying
the email header and then typing in the text that appeared in the GIF
file to send it to PayPal.
Jim Caldwell
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-----Original Message-----
From: owner-olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:owner-olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John A. Lind
Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2003 2:29 AM
To: olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [OM] fake paypal message!!!
I've gotten a couple of these in the past several weeks. Additional
observations about them:
a. The hyperlink itself (most browsers show the actual URL on the
bottom
bar of the window) is set up to have the appearance of a legitimate link
to
PayPal with the actual numeric IP address obscured in hexidecimal.
Seeing
an internet address or portions of a URL in hex sets off alarm bells for
me. Only one reason to do it . . . to obscure something and make it
very
difficult for The Masses to understand or translate.
b. The entire message with embedded GIF is designed to make it very
difficult to forward the original message in its entirety to
PayPal. There's hidden plain text past the GIF that looks like contents
from some innocuous, frivolous email totally unrelated to PayPal. On
top
of that, the hex string with IP for the fraud site and the rest of the
email (including hidden text) exceeded the number of text characters
their
report form allowed.
c. PayPal asked me to forward it to an email address. Their email
server
filtered out the GIF and html when I sent it there! Took a couple email
exchanges with them to get them to see what I had received.
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