Chances are you have a PayPal account.

I can state that because recent polling by Moneyzine.com found that 75% of Americans — three out of every four — said they are active users of the bill-paying service. Founded in 1998, it is among the oldest of online-payment systems. Its closest competitor, Cash App, is used by just over one in four Americans — 27%.

PayPal is used as a form of payment by more than 1.5 million websites and 31 million small businesses.

I have a PayPal account. And the other day, I received an email that appeared to be from a PayPal vendor I never heard of saying my account was being charged for $500-plus. It looked real enough.

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But I remembered something the Federal Trade Commission said about these things years ago: "Don't send money to someone you don't know."

And a Google search confirmed my suspicions: The email was a form of "phishing." The word is spelled that way to indicate there is something fishy going on — as in "fishing for personal information."

In this case, I only needed to click a link in the email to transfer money from my PayPal account to the "vendor." The trouble is, the link is fake, and will send the money to a bogus website. And that, as country singer Ernest Tubbs opined, will be "all she wrote."

On its website, PayPal warns: "Received a money request or invoice you don’t recognize? Don’t pay it. Decline any unwarranted money requests." It goes on the say that suspicious emails or messages should be forwarded to: phishing@paypal.com. Once that's done, delete them.

To learn more, visit this PayPal webpage: www.tinyurl.com/TipsFromPayPal.

Amazon recently established a self-reporting tool where users can report suspicious activity to the company. "We take fraud, scam, phishing and spoofing attempts seriously. If you receive correspondence you think may not be from Amazon, please report it immediately.

"To report suspicious communications including: Emails, Phone Calls or Text Messages, please select the appropriate link below, based on how you have responded to the suspicious communication."

That reporting page can be found at this link: www.tinyurl.com/AmazonReportPage.

Remember: Don't click on links or call phone numbers listed in suspicious email. Go, instead, to the official app or webpage for the company and find contact information there.

Lonnie Brown can be reached at LedgerDatabase@aol.com.

Lonnie Brown can be reached at LedgerDatabase@aol.com.

This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Authentic-looking emails about your accounts are probably from scammers