I buy a lot of stuff on ebay, I also sell books there, not a lot though. Yesterday I got what appeared to be a message sent through ebay from somebody asking, in broken English, why I hadn’t replied to his multiple messages. I found that very weird, I always reply to messages from ebay, I didn’t recall buying anything from that particular user and if it had been somebody interested in one of my books I would have replied tout suit.
Anyways, before I hit the reply link embedded in the message, hypercautious as I am these days, I check directly on ebay, no, no message from that user. Ut oh! So this time I do click on the reply link, which takes me to a site that is remarkably similar to ebay’s. Actually it is identical, except that the URL is not ebay’s, but close enough to fool the uninformed.
I type a message, and hit send, just to see what happens. Voila! I get another page, identical to ebay’s sign in page, asking for my username and password. Of course if it had been a legitimate page it wouldn’t be asking me that, Firefox automatically fills in those fields, but just to see where that takes me I sign in with a fake username and a password made up of all the words that I could never say in public, and wow! I am in! It takes me to another legitimate looking page with links to the real ebay, If I wanted I could have gone on to browsing on ebay without even suspecting what had just happened.
I have 100% feedback, and have over 200 purchases/sales on ebay. The account from which I received the email is legitimate, or so it seems, another ebayer with 100% feedback. I suspect that they hijack accounts with good feedback and that have been opened for several years, these they use to swindle people with fake sales, and also to hijack other accounts. Fucking bastards!
I notified ebay of this, some poor sap must be outthere wondering why he can’t get into his ebay account, but since he seems to buy infrequently he probably won’t notice in a while, by now the crooks probably changed his email address anyway.
Thieves and crooks are amongst my top five least liked people. But you know what, I would like to invite that guy for dinner. He may not enjoy the experience though; the meat might not be to his satisfaction. :mad: