Hide Your PayPal E-mail Address From Spammers And Cons

PayPal is a great way to get online payments, but adding a PayPal button on a Web site or blog invites spammers to spam you, because the example script provided by PayPal requires that your PayPal E-mail address be included in the script. Unfortunately, PayPal requires it to be a legitimate address, because they send messages to that address. Therefore, spammers scrape Web sites and blogs continuously, hunting for E-mail addresses and when they find a PayPal address, they know they've hit pay dirt. PayPal E-mail addresses are targeted for fraud (commonly termed "phishing") because the scammer knows either a credit card or bank account (or both) is attached to it.

A side note is in order here. A common deception is to pretend something is wrong with your PayPal account that requires you to log into your account to fix it. Of course, the scammer provides a link in the E-mail, but it's not to PayPal's site. It's to the scammer's Web server that shows a bogus PayPal login page, and if you type your User ID and password on that page, the scammer has what he needs to steal everything from your account. The tip off is that they send the message to "Dear PayPal Customer" or "PayPal Member" because they have no idea what your name is. I guarantee PayPal knows your name and addresses you by name (or by your company's name if you have a business/merchant account) whenever they send you E-mail messages. And PayPal doesn't show a link with a hidden link to a Web server located in Asia or South America. If it's really from PayPal, the link is to https://www.paypal.com. It's best to type the address yourself in a Web browser instead of clicking on a link in an E-mail, even if you think you should trust the link.

When I added PayPal buttons to my Web site, I encoded my E-mail address within the PayPal button scripts to hide it from Web bots, but I later found an even better way by replacing my E-mail address with my PayPal Referral ID (or Affiliate ID) instead. To find out what your PayPal Referral ID is, log into your PayPal account. After logging in, scroll down to the bottom of the Web page, where there is a Referrals link. Select this link and you'll go to the "Merchant Referral Bonus Program" page. Near the top of this page is the code for the link to "Send your personalized referral link in an email." It looks something like this:

https://www.paypal.com/us/mrb/pal=DO1RE2ME3FA4S

Everything after the pal= is your Referral ID (I put it in red font for emphasis). Copy your Referral ID and paste it into the PayPal button script for the business name's string value (instead of your E-mail address):

<input type="hidden" name="business" value="DO1RE2ME3FA4S">

Save the script on the Web page or blog and when the customer presses the PayPal button, he'll be taken to the secure PayPal site where he can make his online payment. The customer will be able to see your real PayPal E-mail address, but Web bots that scrape Web pages won't unless they follow through with the PayPal transaction, and since Web bots aren't programmed to interact with Web site pages yet, that may be a long time coming.

And while you're on the "Merchant Referral Bonus Program" page, don't forget to copy the "Add a referral logo to your website" script to put on your Web site or blog, like this:



Any new merchant (except eBay merchants) who signs up using your referral link will make you eligible for 0.5% of that merchant's revenues for the first 12 months.