I don't do much with ebay, buying or selling, and I don't have any kind of monetary account with them.
Every week, I'd guess I average 60 scams about my PayPal or Ebay accounts being screwed up. I don't have accounts with either, of course.
It is relentless, and, for whatever reason, AOL's spam filters don't catch them.
I'm basically just curious as to whether or not ebay itself has any kind of active program against this sort of activity. It sure isn't effective, if they do.
Since it's third parties who are doing the spamming/phishing, eBay has no control whatsoever over it.
Just imagine, if you will, what it's like if you run a mail server or two ... all this crap goes to _every_ e-mail address on the servers. It's past the point where a small company can afford the bandwidth/cpu cycles to keep up with it.
Another interesting thing is to take a look at just one day of a server's logs ... there's a war going on that you never hear about, mostly emanating from the Pacific Rim/China and the old Eastern Bloc countries.
I'd gladly supply the rope to hang a few of these idiots in the public square if you can catch'em.
They have a "spoof" team that allegedly checks into each and every one of those "your account may have been compromised" type of scams. Send any suspect emails to them. Can't hurt I suppose.
I don't see how they can really do all that much, they can't control every ISP in the world. Unless and until the ISP's figure out some way to go after their users for attempted fraud, I don't see any real solutions. It's already against the law so more laws won't solve it. Perhaps life imprisonment for internet fraud would do the trick.
I've had some fun with some of the con artists by stringing them along but all that does is show them where they made their mistakes. Their was at least one fairly well know account of a guy who scammed one of the scammers pretty well and I remember reading an account by a news reporter where he tried to turn the tables on one of the "Nigerian" scam artists and then get the guy to talk to him about it for the story.
There was also a piece on NPR about actions being taken by Nigerian officials to try and stop the scams coming out of their country, during the report one of the officials got a scam email...
snipped-for-privacy@ebay.com
Don't expect results--they're swamped with these things.
Bob
It's getting worse. I'm not usre if you're familiar with craigslist but here in the SF bay area and other regions around the us it's a very popular free classifieds site. They now have scammers.
I placed a few pieces on there for sale. Within an hour I recieved 3 responses, all of them scams, all the same scam. They wanted to send me a money order or cahsiers check and they have their own shipper. It seemed suspicious so I check around for fraud alerts and there it was. In fact one of the samples was verbatim to one of the emails I recieved. The basics are that they send you a cashiers check or money order that you bank will accept but will later reject once they find its fake. By that time you have already shipped the product.
In an added twist, they sometimes claim they have a "client" that is willing to pay more than you are asking. In order to expidite, they have the client send you the cashiers chek or money order directly and ask you to send them the difference.
on 7/14/2005 11:00 AM Charlie Self said the following:
It's pretty hard for Ebay/PayPal to do much of anything other than warn their users of the fraud. That's why we (who use Ebay and PayPal) constant reminders that they will never contact us asking for information, etc. YOU, the customer, has to initiate the contact.
These scams, otherwise known as "phishing" are getting quite sophisticated in some respects, yet childish, in others. While the graphics and fake websites look like the real deal, the language employed can be pretty funny. If you received one of these this morning, as I did, you know what I'm talking about.
AOL's spam filters, Thunderbird's spam filters, and most others seem to miss this stuff and so I just keep hitting delete after looking to see what these idiots have come up with THIS time
When you take the time to trace these things back to their point of origin, typically it's off-shore in some third world hell hole or the former USSR (same difference, I guess) or they dead-end at some anonymizer, again, off shore.
What I don't understand is why anyone would ship something before a "certified" check actually clears? I don't mean after it's been deposited, I mean after it clears and the actual money is in your account. Or else simply call the issuing bank and confirm the authenticity of the check and the funds.
The "I'll pay you more than the asking price if you'll send me back the extra money" is my favorite.
I used that one myself on a guy who tried to scam me on a video camera I wanted to buy. After confirming with several sources that he was scamming me I offered to pay him twice what he wanted for the camera if he'd send me the balance in cash...never heard back from him again...strange that.
John Emmons
Well, let's see... the spams are being sent by people with no connection to eBay, from servers that don't belong to eBay... what on earth do you suppose eBay could be doing to stop it?
Forward all these to
They shut down several of these each day.
Many of those phishing emails look convincingly real. However, one dead giveaway, as you pointed out, is when they threaten to cancel an account you never actually had. To avoid having my real email address read by crawlers and bots and added to a million spammers' lists, I have for years been using the fake e-mail address shown in the header of this message. It was only in the last month or so that I actually created a real account using that address just to see how much unsolicited crap would start coming my way. The day I activated the address I got about a dozen pieces of garbage e-mail, 8 of which were bogus eBay and PayPal notices. A while back I did forward one or two of these phishing emails to snipped-for-privacy@ebay.com or snipped-for-privacy@paypal.com and I started getting deluged with (legitimate) confirmations for each one I sent them. I got 1 or 2 a day for about a week, so I finally stopped forwarding the crap to the spoof police.
Lee
I don't spend any time reading spam. But in the little time it takes me to delete the crap, I can often spot grammar errors in just the first sentence or two. English is obviously not their first language.
Isn't there a style or grammar guide for internet crooks?
How is that for an internet service? Editing services for spams, phishes and various sundry con games?
Right. They can do what's called "whack-a-mole" and react to each one, or they can try to educate their customers that they'll never send mail to verify accounts.
Well, they can always hire a consultant to set up spamassassin and or RBL checking for them...
I block entire continents these days, for that reason.
I'll supply the marksmanship and ammunition. Standing/unlimited offer.
Seems to me that there should be some kind of internaitonal cooperation on catching, and punishing, these people. I don't see anyone who is very bright falling for their cons, but the damned things are super annoying, almost as annoying as the new variants on the Nigerian scam.
...
Confirming data???
Better to give them a choice. Duct tape their gonads to the parapet on a 10 story building, then hang them over the parapet wall. Their choice as to what they do. Pull the tape or hang their in agony forever.
Puts new meaning into the phrase, "How they hanging?"
Actually, many of the grammar/spelling errors are _deliberate_. So that the 'erroneous' construct will not match the patterns used by tools that block traffic based on the 'correct' words/phrases.
Dunno. There were some reports about follow-ups and prosecutions some time ago, but those petered out. Nothing since and the amount of crap has risen. Seems like ebay has taken on the con status of E. Podunk Third National Bank for a "Your account is going to be closed out if you don't send us all your info immediately" subjects. I'd be curious to know if they've even checked to see if there is anything they can do.
While we are on this topic, any recommendations for a spam filter? I have been using spam sleuth up till last week when it mysteriously stopped working. I have been unable to raise any kind of help from the company either.
A lot of people think that a certified or cashier's check is like gold and is going to clear. The will if they are not counterfiet.
Do you have change of a $40 bill? Just give me three tens and wi'll call it even. Greed is a wonderful motivator.
Phishing is what it is called.
Not just those two, but Citi Bank, People's Bank, and a few others. Most are caught in the SBC/Yahoo filters, but some get through. They do look legitimate
I like the line "do not try to access your account for 48 hours until our update is complete"
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