A new kind of ebay Phishing email ...

[Vroomfunkel]

Well, I have had enormous numbers of the usual "Your ebay / Paypal account has been suspended, click on this dodgy link and give us your username and password" emails.

Not to mention several fake 'second chance offers' ...

However, today I got one that was somewhat different to all these. Made to look exactly like a standard "Ask the seller a question" email, it read thus:


"Question about postage for item #4772885788 - BRAND NEW SONY VAIO LAPTOP - FREE P & P

Question about your item

Dear seller,

Can you ship to Beverly Hills, CA, 90210 ? How much will be the postage ?"

Since I am not selling anything like this, I had a quick check of the auction link that was below. Sure enough, the target of the link was not on ebay ... when you go to it, it is a fake login page. So I entered some spurious details, and it would appear that once you have done this it simply automatically re-directs you to the real eBay failed login page. So, thinking they have mistyped, the victim will re-enter their details, and this time they will log in successfully to ebay and be none the wiser that they've been scammed.

I'm sure most of you would be wise to this sort of thing if it appeared in your Inbox, but I thought I would just give a heads up to this new format ...

Vroomfunkel

[evil_genius]

Why do they want eBay passwords and user names anyway?

[Super Mario Fan]

Why do they want eBay passwords and user names anyway?

So then they have access to your paypal, credit card #'s, so on and so forth.

[Insaneclown]

Why do they want eBay passwords and user names anyway?

So then they have access to your paypal, credit card #'s, so on and so forth.

Exactly!

[Bronty-2]

man, that is some scary shit. some of these scammers are just so damn slimy.

[Speedy_NES]

They also want to hack your eBay accounts to set up illegal auctions under your name. This happened to me once...I hadn't used eBay for a very long time, and received an e-mail to double check my personal data etc, so I decided to that without knowing that it was a scam...this was quite a few years ago when these phishy e-mails were just getting started. It wasn't until I received a second phishy e-mail that was obviously a fake (which I forwarded to eBay), that I found out that my account had been "hijacked" (by the scammers from the first phishy email) and that eBay found numerous illegal auctions listed under my username. Luckily, all of this evidence was enough to convince eBay, so they immediately removed the listings and reversed any and all changes that had been made by the hijacker....by the time I checked my account it was exactly the way it had been, no listings, no new or bad feedback, etc...so I guess I was lucky ;)

-Speedy