It's obviously phishing season...

I think there has been a sudden upsurge in phishing and spamming since several emails got through gmail's filters yesterday. Seems OK now, so they've probably upped their game with more computer power or something.

But I just had a text claiming to be from PayPal. Somehow I doubted that Paypal really do send texts that contain nothing to indicate that they know anything about me other than their number, and ask me to click on a link that isn't Paypal to resolve the problem. So I checked with Paypal (via their web site, not this link, of course) and needless to say they hadn't contacted me.

While I was checking this out I wanted to look up the phone number that sent the text and found that most of the sites that can do a lookup charge for everything. Since I only wanted to know the carrier I did some more searching and eventually found this site, which is free:

https://www.area-codes.org.uk/mobile/

It turned out it came from Vodaphone, which I suppose is possible, except that the last genuine text I had from Paypal came from a five-digit phone number, which I'm pretty sure is only possible for really big corporations.

No real moral here, just thought others might find that URL useful.