Maybe this isn’t the place to present this, but I just had a pretty significant scare in regardings to one of my eBay selling accounts. I must preface this with I consider myself somewhat savvy in the ways of criminals and that I have been accused of being too suspicious on more than one occasion. That said, this morning I almost made a huge error. In fact, if it had not been for my computer telling me to not trust this site, I would not have given it much further thought.
I have a few items for sell on eBay. This morning as I was checking the email account associated with my eBay account, I found a question about an SAT book I have listed in my auctions. Now, I must add here that I just recently sold a another prep book on eBay for which the (Canadian)purchaser filed a dispute for not receiving the book within 5 days of payment. This new question on the second book at first, and second, glance appeared to have come from eBay, but I could not find the info in my eBay account. Based on the other sale, I thought that eBay was experiencing some kind of tech difficulties. Somewhat annoyed, I decided to go ahead and respond to the question through the regular email. When I clicked on the respond now button, (thank goodness) my computer told me that the destination was a phishing site.
After going back to look at the official looking email again, I realized that there was one tiny, tiny difference…the return address was “ebey.com” rather than “ebay.com”. If my computer had not caught the attempted fraud, I would have gone to a site and typed in my password so that I could access my account.
I know some of you sell on eBay, so I thought it best to get this particular scam out there. It is so much different than any of the many that I have received in the past.
August 14th, 2008 - 5:38 am
I had a terrible eBay experience where someone in England bought a phone system for about $1000 under my name. I have no idea how it happened because, like you, I consider myself pretty savvy. eBay and Paypal wouldn’t tell me a thing. I wanted to know exactly what had been compromised, was it my password, my credit cards, my bank account? But no, no help at all. A few days after my initial complaint, they said the case was closed and would return my money. It’s funny, they returned the money but not the difference in the exchange rate. I had to call them and jump up and down to get that taken off too. Even though I wanted to close all accounts associated with eBay and Paypal, I had heard that they often “forget” how things were resolved and simply take the money from your bank accound even months later. I still have the accounts but don’t use them and watch them very carefully.