Most phishing scam emails I notice straight away. All the ebay and paypal ones stick out like a sore thumb. Of course the ones from a bank I’ve never heard of get deleted without thinking about it.
But there is a new ebay themed one which is pretty good*. The first one I got I actually gave it a second look and a WTF question mark appeared over my head.
This is supposed to be a question or comment from a ebay member. It is formatted like the regular Question from eBay member email.
The second I received said something like “I sent the payment to you in paypal. Where is my stuff? I’m going to file a complaint, etc, etc.”
Of course the scam is the button to reply to the message. It takes you to the fake page to capture your login info.
I thought it was interesting because I went to ebay and looked up the usernames. They are real names.
People are going to get scammed by this one I think. Someone is accusing you of something and there is a nice button to correct them in front of you. I think many people won’t even think about it. They’ll just click the button.
I just got one from “Paypal” letting me I just paid $400+ for some kind of watch. The delivery info wasn’t me, of course. I sent it to Paypal’s scam department. I also checked my Paypal account (but not through the email link, which went a site that didn’t even have the courtesy to have “paypal” in it) and, as expected, there’s no record of the transaction.
That sounds like something I’d fall for too, good thing you told us about it. I’ve had fake emails for eBay too, and sent them to their security people. They said that you should check “My Messages” on your “my eBay” page to see if the messages are legit, anything that isn’t there too isn’t sent through eBay.
I’ve gotten the PayPal watch scam too and almost fell for that one.
I got one recently from someone with an @ancestry.com tag on the username, saying that they saw I was on a spammer list. They wanted to know if I was really a spammer. The only reason I looked at it was because I’m an amateur genalogist. Luckily, my virus filter caught the damn thing before it got to my computer.
I got one that purported to be a seller of a china cabinet congratulating me on my winning high bid and asking if the default ground shipping arrangmenet would be OK.
WTF, I’m not buyiung a ^$#!## china cabinet !? WHO THE FUCK IS BUYING STUFF WITH MY USERNAME??? Lemme see that auction!!!
::clicks the email link::
Hmmm… cute. Let’s see if I can bring up this item from within eby after going to ebay.com first, shall we?