PayPal users can avail of new Gmail verification feature to avoid phishing

Michael Barrett here, PayPal’s Chief Information Security Officer reported on the company blog about the new tools introduced by Google to protect Internet users from bogus mail sent by scammers to defraud unwitting victims and steal their personal data. In addition to already existing digital “sign” that PayPal attaches to all its outbound e-mail to make it easier for ISPs to verify that it comes from paypal.com, Google introduces a new verification feature.

The new feature (currently in Google Labs) visually verifies each email from PayPal as truly from the payment system. PayPal strongly recommends to all its users with Gmail accounts to “go to the settings tab and turn on this new security feature”. In order to do this users need:

1. Go to Settings
2. Click on Labs
3. Go to “Authentication icon for verified senders” and click “enable”