PayPaI

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Note that the last character in the title of this article is an 'i' ("EYE"), not an 'L' ("EL").

This article is about a phishing scam. For the legitimate payment system, see PayPal.

PayPaI was a phishing scam in mid 2000 which targeted account holders of the widely used Internet payment service PayPal using the fact that an upper case "i" may be difficult to distinguish from a lower case "L" in some computer fonts. PayPal sends account holders a notification email when they receive payments. Spam was sent out mimicking these payment notifications and indicating that the account holder had received a large payment and directed recipients to paypai.com through a link in the message.

PayPal is often the target of phishing attacks as seen in the picture on the right.

The site, paypai.com was an exact replica of the HTML source code and images that PayPal uses on its home page. While devious, this is not a particularly difficult since the html and images are downloaded for display when one visits a website. The site was registered with network solutions to a Birykov in South Ural, Russia. The site was quickly shut down.

[edit] PayPal's Response

PayPal has guaranteed that no PayPal user will lose money as a result of this incident. ^{[citation needed]} Paypal has not reported that any customers had become victims of the scam. ^{[citation needed]}

• ZDNet UK - PayPal alert! Beware the 'PaypaI' scam