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.