How to spot a PayPal scam

I've heard of so many PayPal scams that try every trick in the book to get you to give them key information they need in order to access your PayPal account and most likely drain it of its contents. Scary thought, right?

Well, recently, I received two three such communications posing as PayPal. If you are not careful, you will really fall for them because they look very official - carrying the PayPal logo in the right colors and with official sounding words.

Here's the first email I received:

Giveaway #1: The email came from service@paypal.net (Paypal's URL is https://paypal.com)

Giveaway #2: I hovered over "Confirm My Account" without clicking. On bottom left of screen, the real URL that showed up was www.merzougaonline.com/ppl/ (a totally unrelated URL to PayPal).

Giveaway #1: The email also came from service@paypal.net (like the first one above)
Giveaway #2: Hovering over all the links, you will also see that they do not direct to PayPal but to some unknown URL links and none of them are "https" (the sign of a secure log-in URL).

Giveaway #1: The email, though it says "service@paypal" actually links to noreply@service-orders-bes.com (a fake URL)

Giveaway #2: When I hover over "Confirm My Email Address" I see that the real link goes to nationalproducts.org/admin/... (again, a non-PayPal URL)

Another hint that it's a fake email is when you receive the email on an email address which is different from the one registered with PayPal.

PayPal itself has issued guidelines to help us:

Screencap from PayPal's site

Stay alert always. Before responding to the email, check using the guidelines and giveaways above. And always log securely into your PayPal account from its official URL and not from any email links.