Stephanie McIntyre at SecurityProNews:
I am surprised that there are so many new scams on eBay these days. It seems that everyday I get at least one or two new invitations to fork over my userid, password or credit card info.
There is very little that you can get past me now as far as a scam goes. But recently I was caught in a very subtle scam that was very clever.
I was sent a message that appeared to come from someone with whom I was involved in a transaction.
The message had the distinctive look of an eBay email message with the yellow “RESPOND HERE” button off to the right. The message merely said “I’ve sent the payment through Paypal when are you going to ship my item?” it included a link with the item number. I later realized the message was designed to be evocative and get me to click on the response button.
I clicked on the item number thinking that it would take me to the eBay item that I was selling, which the buyer had paid for and was waiting to be shipped. Instead I was taken to an eBay sign-in screen, which seemed a little different but I went ahead and signed in using my eBay sign-in ID and password.
I went on from there to research the item the buyer was looking for.
The next morning I went to check my auction and saw that in addition to the items I was legitimately selling on eBay, was an auction for a Porsche. I immediately contacted eBay and they were able to determine that the auction was fraudulent. They promptly cancelled the auction.
I consider myself an eBay professional, after all I have been trading on the site for well over 5 years, so getting caught by a scammer was a real surprise.
Photo by scataudo.
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