Just yesterday on my ‘junk email’ at yahoo, I had an email from an eBay person demanding to know why I hadn’t sent him the item he won from ‘me’ back in January – the text of the email was in reply to a 3rd party…hmmm
- I don’t use the yahoo address for eBay, theenx
- this guy is a real eBay name, but what he insists I sold him isn’t ‘typical’ of the stuff he seems to bid on & definately something I never sold anyone (so someone was using his eBay ID, how loverly)
- it was a 3 line email but according to the subject line, was 97K in size (no attachment)
I’m so conscientious about my sales on eBay I actually started to compose a reply to this guy (‘I’m terribly sorry, but I have no idea who you are, and we’ve never completed a transaction together’) before the frontal lobes kicked in and suggested that this might not be legit…
Thanks for the paypal scam info – my own mum would be quick to reply to it, as anything that smacks of authority (but it’s on the internet, it MUST be true!) and she’s hitting the reply key…
cheers
Wow. What a terrible scam. Gotta admit, it’s pretty ingenious, but damn is it evil!
If the scammers are stupid and all the relevant parties cooperate, it will be a simple matter to track them down and lock the fuckers up…hopefully for a very, very long time. The owner of the free website service should release the IP address of whomever set up the account to the police, who should then consult the ISP that owns the address to learn the true identity of the offender.
Unfortunately, the scammers probably aren’t that stupid. More than likely, they’re setting up the websites from behind strings of regular proxy servers and doing the Paypal stuff with SSL-equipped proxies. We can only hope that the owners of all the proxy servers involved are not only willing to give up their logs, but able to. People often delete log files after a certain amount of time.
This could be a really tough nut to crack. Unless more people are made aware (this scam NEEDS media attention in a big way), I can see the potential for massive losses.
Thank you for starting this thread, Dewey Cheatem Undhow. Good to see you doing the exact opposite of your username. 
More information on this well-known scam:
Online payment service PayPal hit by scam
By LINDA ROSENCRANCE
SEPTEMBER 27, 2002
Source: Computerworld
PayPal users targeted by e-mail scam – again By LINDA ROSENCRANCE
OCTOBER 25, 2002
Source: Computerworld
Port5 needs to get their shit together. I just got another one of these, exactly the same as the first, only this time the form posts to robinsonhost.port5.com.