I know some folks here use eBay quite a bit, so I figured I’d start a warning thread.
I just received an email, purportedly from eBay, claiming that the company needed to “verify” my information. That’s nothing new in the scam department, of course. The sneaky bit about this one is that the body of the message, which included a legitimate eBay login link, was actually an image with an email link to an anonymous IP address. The idea is to trick the reader into thinking that they’re following the link that appears in the text, which fits eBay’s security warnings.
My scam-sense tingles whenever I see “verify your information” in an email, so I looked carefully before clicking, but others might not. I’ve already forwarded the mail on to eBay, but I figure that the more people who are alerted to it, the better. Always look at your status bar to make sure that links lead where they say they lead.
Mama Tiger finds these things amusing, since she knows better, but I find them disturbing. People wouldn’t do this unless it worked. I’d like to whack them first, and then whack everybody who falls for this stuff.
Snopes is your friend. Unfortunately, people usually get pissed if you refer them to it.
Not just eBay, but PayPal scams, too. My rule of thumb is: No matter who it SAYS it comes from, if it asks me for ANY information to be submitted by email it’s a scam. I got one the other day saying my PayPal account would be canceled if I didn’t provide them with my: login, password, bank account and bank routing number, credit card number and extra verification number, etc., etc., etc. Riiiiight.
Damn right. That’s why I stopped bothering to refute whatever spam is currently making the rounds at work. Pissed cow-orkers can be very annoying and it’s not good for the cows either.
I’ve been getting EBAY spoof emails for some time. Some of them are getting very realistic. Forward them with their full headers to spoof@eebay.com
They even link to sites that look like they are on www.eebay.com . I would currently suggest never linking to a site from a link within an email. But go to www.ebay.com and the your account section, and see if EEBAY is realy requesting anything from you.
As an asside, would it not be easy for fraud investigators to reply to these spoofs with traced credit card numbers, and then arrest anyone attempting to use those credit card details?
Well, I guess you need to whack me. I checked my email a few weeks ago (I don’t check this particular address often) and saw that if I didn’t respond by a certain date, they were canceling my ebay account. It was about a week after the deadline, so I’ve been bumming out, thinking my account had been cancelled. All my hard earned feedback (all 17 or so of them), gone.
I didn’t bother to try to rectify the situation - I just bummed out. So YAY my account hasn’t been cancelled and I can go back to buying things once or twice a year.
