More Innovative Scamming

It turns out that there is a class action lawsuit against PayPal, due to people not being able to get access to their money somehow. If you've used EBay, you've probably used PayPal. So, imagine how happy I should have been when I got a very official looking mail from PayPal saying:

You have received this Notice because the records of PayPal, Inc. indicate you are a current or former PayPal account holder who has been deemed eligible to receive a payment from the class action settlement in accordance with PayPal Litigation, Case No. 02 1227 JF PVT, pending in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose.

In your specific case you have been found to be eligible for a payment of $8971.99 USD.

The aforementioned settlement funds may be transferred directly to your bank account providing you have a linked card. The funds may not be credited directly to your PayPal account as this would render Paypal to be accumulating interest and thus profiting on litigation settlement funds which contravenes Federal law. Your bank account will be credited within 7 days upon submission of account details.

To credit your bank account please click here.

Hot damn! As usual, the law of "be suspicious of getting something for nothing" holds. The really slimy part, though, is that a Google search on "02 1227 JF PVT" (the lawsuit) ends up showing all kinds of pages telling you that this is in fact a real lawsuit, and that the mail you received -- a different mail than this one -- is in fact "true". I guess at the point in time when the legal firm representing the class action lawsuit was looking for participants, they sent out a mail seeking people. As a result, there were lots of people trying to figure out if the mails were real or not. Fortunately, the official web site for the claims administrator, which looks remarkably unofficial and scamlike itself, has a warning about this scam. Be careful out there.