POSTED: 5:48 p.m. PST March 13, 2003

Bebe Emerman
KIRO 7 Eyewitness News Consumer Investigator

It looks like the real thing, but it's just a ploy to steal your money.

A KIRO 7 Consumer Investigation exposes the latest email scam sweeping Western Washington.

Better check your inbox: There's an email circulating that says it's from PayPal, the online payment service.

But if you do what it says, you'll wind up with an empty bank account and –- maybe -- a stolen identity.

"This is my interesting email from PayPal," said Linda Gilham.

When Gilham saw this message in her inbox, she was suspicious right away.

"I'm not a PayPal customer," she said.

Spoof Email Form Claiming To Be From PayPal:

But that was just the beginning. The message asked for a PayPal password, a credit card number, even a bank account number.

"So I thought, red flag alert," she said. "Somebody's trying to get a lot of information to use for their own benefit."

Gilham says she's surprised at how authentic the message looks. The PayPal logo is perfectly reproduced.

"Even had the trademark sign at the bottom of the Paypal word," she said.

And the explanation that this is just "a regular maintenance of security measures" sounds convincing.

"It could fool people if they weren't really thinking about it or really looking for it."

PayPal is owned by eBay. A company spokesman told us this is what's called a "spoof" email. And this one is particularly prolific. It's gone out to literally millions of people all over the world.

STOPPING EMAIL SCAMS Report Spoof Email To PayPal Don't Want Your Email Address Harvested? How Spammers Reap What You Sow More On Identity Theft From FTC

Legitimate companies never ask for confidential information like this, especially in an unsolicited email.

Providing it gives crooks a green light to steal your identity.

Authorities say if you get a message like this, hit "delete" -- or better yet, report the fraud.

"Red alert. This is not right, find out who needs to circumvent whatever's happening."

It's incredibly cheap and easy to send out millions of scam emails like this. Experts say if even one person falls for it, the crooks make all the money they've spent and then some.