Don’t fall for latest variation of eBay scam
December 19, 2005 by Mike Wendland
The scamsters who try to trick you into revealing your eBay password have a new trick: They send you phony e-mails claiming that you sent them an offer to buy or sell something improper and threaten to report you to eBay unless you explain yourself by hitting a respond now button. It comes looking for all the world as a real eBay mailing, as you can see in the example I post here of one I received just this morning (click it to enlarge).
If you hit that respond button you’re taken to another spoofed site that looks like the eBay login page.
All it really does is capture your ID, which can be used by criminals. The key is the URL attached to the e-mail respond button. It goes elsewhere than eBay. In the case of the example above, it’s a dummy site somewhere in Romania, as revealed by the .ro suffix in the address line.
You can learn other ways to recognize these ever-changing scams from the Security Center at the REAL eBay site.
Word of advice. If you ever receive a REMOTELY SUSPICIOUS e-mail claiming to be from ebay, forward it to spoof@ebay.com
This is ebay’s fraud department. The sooner they receive these forwards, the faster they can shut down these scammers.
The more of them they receive, the greater they know the threat to be. Hence, the sooner it will be dealt with.