I know you guys are too smart to fall for this, but...

I got this e-mail today. VERY official looking with logos, etc.:

PayPal is committed to maintaining a safe environment for its community of customers. To protect the security of your account, PayPal employs some of the most advanced security systems in the world and our anti-fraud teams regularly screen the PayPal system for unusual activity.

We are contacting you to remind you that on 25 Feb. 2005 our Account Review Team identified some unusual activity in your account. In accordance with PayPal's User Agreement and to ensure that your account has not been compromised, access to your account was limited. Your account access will remain limited until this issue has been resolved.

Got the same thing last week and ignored it. This time I forwarded it to paypal. Got this back:

Thank you for contacting PayPal.

We appreciate you bringing this suspicious email to our attention. We
can confirm that the email you received was not sent to you by PayPal.
The website linked to this email is not a registered URL authorized or
used by PayPal. We are currently investigating this incident fully.
Please do not enter any personal or financial information into this
website.

If you have surrendered any personal or financial information to this
fraudulent website, you should immediately log into your PayPal Account and change your password and secret question and answer information. Any compromised financial information should be reported to the appropriate parties.

I also get e-mails from "banks" that run along about the same line. I can understand how someone a little bit gullible, or not too worldly wise, might respond to something like this.
Needless to say, don't. Forward it to the company they're impersonating.

My favorite is the unusual approaches to English they tend to use:

By this letter we inform you, you must verify your account to given E-Mail.
Otherwise we stop temporarily service of your account.

We ask you to confirm immediately of your parity the debit account to given e-mail.
Please do not reaply this letter.

Etc etc etc

A little unnerving, even though I know every one of them is fake.

If you're ever worried about it, though, open a new browser window and log directly into the site in question (PayPal, Ebay, etc.). If there really is a problem, you'll find out there. Never click on a link in an e-mail. But you know that.

From fake eBay AND PayPal sites.

eBay recommends that you copy the full headers and forward them to "spoof@ebay.com."

Also, watch out for a new e-mail variant making the rounds.

These have official-looking logos of different banks: MBNA, Wachovia, Bank Of America, etc.

They still have the same goofy pidgin English and links to fake sites. I assume they're phishing for account numbers.

And I don't have an account at any of them.
The spelling in the e-mail was a dead giveaway.

That makes them especially nasty. Very, very official-looking. One dead giveaway is that they'll address you as "Dear PayPal User" or "Dear Ebay Subscriber" or something generic along those lines, rather than by your name or screen name. But again, these people are devious, and their techniques keep evolving.

Here's a trick I've learned recently: If you ever really do open one of these links (and you never, never should, but IF you do), put in a fake password, and see what happens. A spoof site will accept it (since they don't know what your real password is), whereas the real site will reject you.

I've done the "forwarding of spoof mails" several times, but if I forwarded each one, I'd waste far too much time, especially on my slow connection. So I'm just deleting them without even opening the message now.