This came in an e-mail from a friend. Thought I would pass it along. 
I hadn't heard of this before, but thought I'd better pass the word around right away.
I got two messages from eBay today, in the format where buyers and sellers talk to each other thru eBay. I get these all the time when I ask sellers a question, etc.
This time, however, it was supposedly from another eBay member who was sending me a message giving me a hard time about taking his money and not shipping the item. Well, in ten years on eBay I've NEVER sold an item, so I figured this guy just screwed up, but since he referred to me as an "*******" and threatened to report me to eBay and the police, I started to punch the button to respond to him and explain just what part of my anatomy he could .... well, you get the idea.,
However, being of a suspicious nature, I did a Seller Search and a Buyer Search on this guy first, just to see if he actually bought something from somebody, maybe someone with a similar User ID. Nope. He hadn't bid on anything in 30 days ... so I punched the Respond Now button and it asked, naturally, for my User ID and Password. Now I'm really suspicious, so I look up at the site it was referring me to, and it was eBay, but in Czechoslovakia ! A few other games with the Properties button, and it's obvious that this isn't eBay, but some data-mining company in Eastern Europe, hoping to piss off people (like I was) and get them to respond (supposedly through eBay, with your password). I'll bet it works a lot, and then they've got your User ID & password, plus probably your email address. Not a good thing.
The lesson here: If you get some off-the-wall message "through eBay" where it looks like some buyer has just mis-sent a complaint to you in error -- DO NOT RESPOND !!!!!!
I've seen a great number of 'phishing' and data-mining scams over the years, but this is one of the sneakiest I've seen. Most you can smell a mile away, but this one almost got me. I admire creativity, but I hope these guys die slowly of Transylvanian Crotch Rot.
I hadn't heard of this before, but thought I'd better pass the word around right away.
I got two messages from eBay today, in the format where buyers and sellers talk to each other thru eBay. I get these all the time when I ask sellers a question, etc.
This time, however, it was supposedly from another eBay member who was sending me a message giving me a hard time about taking his money and not shipping the item. Well, in ten years on eBay I've NEVER sold an item, so I figured this guy just screwed up, but since he referred to me as an "*******" and threatened to report me to eBay and the police, I started to punch the button to respond to him and explain just what part of my anatomy he could .... well, you get the idea.,
However, being of a suspicious nature, I did a Seller Search and a Buyer Search on this guy first, just to see if he actually bought something from somebody, maybe someone with a similar User ID. Nope. He hadn't bid on anything in 30 days ... so I punched the Respond Now button and it asked, naturally, for my User ID and Password. Now I'm really suspicious, so I look up at the site it was referring me to, and it was eBay, but in Czechoslovakia ! A few other games with the Properties button, and it's obvious that this isn't eBay, but some data-mining company in Eastern Europe, hoping to piss off people (like I was) and get them to respond (supposedly through eBay, with your password). I'll bet it works a lot, and then they've got your User ID & password, plus probably your email address. Not a good thing.
The lesson here: If you get some off-the-wall message "through eBay" where it looks like some buyer has just mis-sent a complaint to you in error -- DO NOT RESPOND !!!!!!
I've seen a great number of 'phishing' and data-mining scams over the years, but this is one of the sneakiest I've seen. Most you can smell a mile away, but this one almost got me. I admire creativity, but I hope these guys die slowly of Transylvanian Crotch Rot.
