Possible fraudulent Ebay e-mail... *IMPORTANT*

F

Forest Mercenary

CAGiversary!
I recently got an e-mail from [email protected] titled User Agreement Section 9, which said that my account had been compromised, and that to prevent fraudulent activity, I had to verify my account. Ok, nothing wrong with that, and the link seemed fairly legit at first glance. BTW, I could not copy + paste anything from the e-mail or the website, unlike the actual ebay.com where you can, otherwise I would have just copied + pasted all of the email. BUT, when I went to the link, I found something fishy. For one, on the e-mail, they say they will suspend my account if I do not update within 72 hours, and will assume that it is fraudulent, yet on the link they state that the reason to update is if you do not, ebay may "behave abnormally and errors will occur without notification," nothing about your account being suspended, which would seem like the primary reason for you to update. And the thing that got to me the MOST about what I had to fill out was that besides my ebay screen-name and password, I had to include my e-mail address and my EMAIL PASSWORD. Now call me crazy, but how in the f'n world does ebay have any right to ask for your email password?

I am almost sure this is BS, but, since there is a potential consequence involved (suspended account, which = good-bye credibility, and sales), I had to ask in case this was actually legit and if everyone else/some other people got it and replied. Since I can't copy the link, and I don't have the patience to bother trying to type it all out, I will just point out some things I found awkward about it. First of all, instead of starting with http://, it is https://, and the latter part of the link is UsingSSL==3D1, which just seemed kinda weird. Now I'm not too keen with internet addresses, so maybe there were others parts of the link that should have brought up more suspision, but I only pointed out what seemed awkward to me.

Just wanted to ask for my safety, and the safety of others in case someone else got this email. Please try to respond quickly if you at all know anything about this, or can diagnose whether or not the email is legit, as my "due-date" is running out.

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: I was hurrying when I typed this, so I just fixed some grammar, and some eh-provoking parts that were rather hard to understand.
 
Please post the entire email message, including headers (and if it was an HTML mail, include the actual source, don't just copy and paste).

Bottom line: it's probably an attempt at phishing. Don't respond to it.
 
:? I was hoping I wouldn't have to do that. .It's late, and I still have U.S. History crap to do, including studying for a test. Isn't what I provided enough? I mean, e-mail password?! And btw, since https does not appear as a link, what exactly is it?
 
OK. Look, just log onto ebay as you normally would. If you don't get a warning or anything, ignore the e-mail. Good night.
 
DON"T RESPOND TO IT!!! It is a fraud. Ebay will never ask you for info like that or send you a email like that. It is a scam !!!...Do not give out any of your personal info. Go to ebay and look at their security guidelines and follow those...They may want you to report this email to them. They also have live help that can instant message you with answers to your questions free of charge.
 
[quote name='eldad9']OK. Look, just log onto ebay as you normally would. If you don't get a warning or anything, ignore the e-mail. Good night.[/quote]

Yea, you're right. I paniced for no reason. I really should have just initially gone to My Ebay, and checked my status/etc. In fact, I was still signed into ebay, and nothing, at all. This would be a good thing to report, but since you can't copy + paste, and really, I get nothing out of it, I won't. And very smart move on not allowing copy + paste, since I guarantee the majority of the people that caught this, just like me won't bother filing a complaint, since it's much more of a hassle if you can't paste the initial message. Althought they actually spelled correctly (unlike some other ebay scams), this was still a really half-assed attempt considering they added e-mail password as one of the things necessary, and didn't even bother to make the warning the same as in the e-mail.

4/10 on the attempt.

EDIT: I typed all that junk out, and still failed to answer the important question; YES, the e-mail was a fraud, and if you get one similar to it, DO NOT RESPOND.
 
No online companies, including eBay, AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, whatever else you can think of, will ever ask you for your password. They have that information on file, that's how you log-in in the first place. Companies like eBay will never ask you for your email password or other non-eBay related information. As soon as someone asks you for password information, a red flag should go up immediately: it is undoubtedly fraud and you should report it. And above all, don't respond with the information!

Thanks for alerting us! There are lots of scammers out there, and it's good to know we can keep an eye out by sharing these instances with each other.
 
These emails are nothing new. I seem to get 1 every month or so. If you ever have to question the accountability of the email, just forward it to [email protected]. Ebay will investigate it from there and tell you if it is a scam or not.
 
I received one that could easily fool most people not too long ago. The email had a link to a site with some clever scripts. It hid the IE address bar and replaced it with some phony looking one with what looked to be an official ebay web address. The page had all the usual ebay graphics and looked close enough to the original.

I forwarded the email to ebay.
 
Yesterday I got something from some site where I don't even have an account.

Aside from that the funniest thing was that they didn't ask or warn me to update my info, they "demand"ed it.
 
[quote name='yeldarb367']I recieved one of these a few days ago. Sad to think that a lot of people fall for them.[/quote]

Yeah. I hade the people who send this bs.
 
i actually fell for it once :( ...good thing i changed the password and other stuff...but i still get those..in fact i got one like 2 days ago :evil:

i didnt respond b/c i KNOW i didnt give anyone my pass...sooo..i'll just forward this to spoof :)
 
Since you entered your ebay username and password on the page the link sent you to, I think you should go to ebay and change your password in case they try to take over your account. I received some of these emails before, and in these emails the text of the link doesn't match the address it actually links to.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
bread's done
Back
Top