An e-mail Tuesday warned law students about a new e-mail virus that is circulating.

According to the Law Information Technology Services warning, the e-mail poses as a message from PayPal, the eBay company that allows individuals and businesses to send and receive payments online. When opened, the e-mail attachment asks users to enter their credit card numbers to prevent their PayPal accounts from expiring.

The attached program then spreads the e-mail to others by harvesting viruses from the computer’s hard drive. The worm also tries to harvest bank card data and send it in an e-mail, according to an article on the Sophos anti-virus company’s Web site.

The e-mail message states that the recipient’s PayPal account will expire in five days and that personal information is required to reactivate the account.