Beware this "eBay" Scam

Last week I submitted an article to a content distribution site, using a unique email address.

Today I received an email at that address headed:
WARNING: CONFIRM YOUR eBay RECORDS

It included, among other things, these lines:
'We recently have determined that different computers have logged onto your eBay account, and multiple password failures were present before the logons. We now need you to re-confirm your account information to us. If this is not completed by Feb 11, 2005, we will be forced to suspend your account indefinitely, as it may have been used for fraudulent purposes ...
Click here to verify your account.'

The email was clean, professional, used the eBay logo, copyright, address etc - for all the world it looked 'official' and genuine.

And I do have an eBay account.

Thankfully, the alarm bells went off immediately and I fired off a complaint to the content distribution site - who at least have an email address listed for 'abuse'. Too early to tell of any response.

But then I thought I'd check up what eBay have to say about such matters.

Sure enough, they have an entire tutorial on 'spoof' (fake) emails. It starts out:

'Spoof emails can be a major problem for unsuspecting Internet users. Claiming to be sent by well-known companies, these emails ask consumers to reply with personal information, such as their credit card number, social security number or account password.

'These deceptive emails are called "Spoof Emails" because they fake the appearance of a popular Web site or company in an attempt to commit identity theft. Also known as "hoax" or "phisher"emails, this practice is occurring more and more frequently throughout the online world.'

You can access the tutorial at


Obviously, gone are the days when you could easily pick such an email because of how crudely it was done - layout, spelling, grammar etc.

Just makes it that much more important to always access any account from a known-reliable source - such as your own bookmarks or by direct typing.

The incident also confirmed the value of using unique email addresses. That way I was easily able to identify the site responsible for adding me to a spammer's list.

Some free email accounts will allow you to add unique identifiers (although the one I used created its own spam by sending me everything directed to every email account it held that started with the same letter as mine!)

If you have your own domain, you can usually set up the email to accept (or block!) any username - e.g. mary@yourdomain.com or thatsite@yourdomain.com.

That way,at least, you know where the shots are coming from!