e-bayphish

This is a short blog to put in the public domain and warn people of the ever increasing scam called "phishing".This is fresh off the press so to speak. I have an e-bay account and sell the odd item from time to time.The last time i sold anything was over 6 months ago which in a way was a good thing becasue it alerted me to be suspicious of an e-mail i got today from supposedly e-bay about an undelivered item i was supposed to have sold in October!

Here is a picture of the e-mail(click on the picture in order to increase image size) so you can see how realistic it is.You may need to view using I.E. browser to see the screenshot......There are links to respond to the e-mail as you can see plus there are links on the url supposedly relating to the advert on e-bay.Needless to say i didnt click on the links.Besides not having listed any items on e-bay for over 6 months the other clue was that there is no e-bay user name anywhere in the e-mail.If it was a genuine and from e-bay my user name would have been on the first line of the e-mail.

As a further precaution to check the validity of mail from e-bay you need to close the browser dwon and then type in www.e-bay.com in the address bar.Enter your own e-bay id and password and then go to "my messages". Any correspondence from e-bay particularly disputes would always be in your message box.

I checked this and yes there have been no messages for over 6 months.What the purpose of this "phishing episode" was , i dont know....it could be they check for people who havent been online for a good while and once they have pinched your id etc they can then sell on e-bay in your name and never send any goods out.In cases of any future disputes then the "phisher " would have made money for nothing and i would have ended up trying to resolve the fraud....At an estimated cost of $800 according to a motley fool article (see link below)..plus not being able to use e-bay till the matter would be resolved to their satisfaction..

I have had one previous e-bay phish but that was completely different .On that occasion i copied the e-mail and returned it to the e-bay fraud department.....So i hope this has helped in some way especially if you are an e-bayer but anyone can fall victim to phishing.As you may or may not know ..identity theft is one of the fastest growing crimes worldwide...if any reader has had similar experiences or knows of any particular "phish" or scam at the moment please ad it to the comments on the blog and i will then post it for future readers....also check out this article which details ways of avoiding identity theft and what to do if you are a victim..

to be continued..