Curious about ebay

for 'unsolicited, commercial spam e-mail',_in_and_of_itself_, the answer is "No". It may be an actionable 'civil tort', however.

Sending email _can_ be a criminal offense, if there are specific characteristics of that message that meet other specifictions in law.

Yuppers. tracing back to the perps _is_ a problem.

Reply to
Robert Bonomi
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In article , Lee Gordon wrote:

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Reply to
Robert Bonomi

Yes, it's real but impossible to prosecute successfully... :(

Reply to
Duane Bozarth

Howdy Robert,

What about "theft of services" ... as in unauthorized use of bandwidth and cpu cycles needed to process the spam that are subsequently no longer available to your customers?

Having to increase and pay for additional, and expensive, bandwidth due to the increased volume of spam is most definitely a financial burden for smaller companies and has the same bottom line result as outright theft. DAMHIKT

Reply to
Swingman

Gary wrote: >

I just wanted to reinforce what Gary wrote. I'm a computer programmer in my day job. The emails these "phishers" send out often encourage you to click a link to log in to ebay or PayPal or whatever, and the link actually says "

formatting link
" or something like that. In HTML, you can have the text of a link say anything you want, but the actual target of that link is something entirely different. So while the link says
formatting link
the actual target is
formatting link
or something.

Worse yet, there was a bug in Internet Explorer last year that let a knowledgeable hacker exploit the browser so that the address bar at the top of the page would actually say whatever they wanted, even though the page was actually being displayed from a completely different location! So if you clicked on a link in these phishers' emails, your browser would go to a page that looked just like eBay's login page, and the location bar of your browser would actually say "

formatting link
", but the page is actually coming from a completely different location.

Be careful out there. Trust no one when it comes to your money. Type in the address yourself, or use your bookmarks. Never trust links in emails, even if they appear to be from trustworthy sources.

Kevin.

Reply to
Kevin

Kevin wrote in news:Ms6dnbQ7JOUn snipped-for-privacy@rogers.com:

The version of Firefox running on my machine warns me when the target url: differs from what the html says. Or at least I think it does. I get a pop-up box...

Patriarch

Reply to
Patriarch

This very thing happened to my wife and me. I got a really wierd vibe from the potential buyer and told him I didn't want to sell the him our brand new $1200.00 Asko washing machine. He literally flipped out on me on the phone. I just thought I crossed paths with a damaged soul but the above quote is identicle to what we experienced on Craigslist. We have sold many things on Craigslist before with no problem, I guess as with everything else in life you just need to really pay attention to that little voice within.

Reply to
Matisse

And where was the ship-to address? Unless it was some bogus address, it shouldn't be all the difficult for authorities to track to who was using it even if it was a rented postal mail box. Must have been something more elaborate than that to evade detection.

Reply to
Upscale

Wishful thinking, I'm afraid.

In general, law holds out that if you make a service/facility available to the 'world at large', you have to give 'actual notice' to the specific party that you wish to prohibit from using tat service/facility. "Notice by publication" is _not_ sufficient -- you have to be able to show that they actually *read* that notice, and ignored it.

Similar issue/problem with a civil suit for the common-law tort of 'trespass to chattel' -- which *has* been used successfully against spammers.

Yes, the _effect_ is virtually indistinguishable. Unfortunately the law does not regard the 'cause' as equivalent.

Reply to
Robert Bonomi

Thanks for the reasoned response ... I'll keep that rope handy just in case.

Reply to
Swingman

Even with RBLs and spamassassin, a lot of these get through just fine. Too many kiddies put up linux boxes with wide open SMTP relays and spammers find these as fast as they show up. I use 8 different RBLs, including maintaining one of my own, and I still get an avg of 5-10 spam emails a day coming through my mail server.

Blocking entire continents only prevents them from sending directly to you. They still get through those open SMTP relays that show up daily.

Reply to
Odinn

On 7/14/2005 1:41 PM Charlie Self mumbled something about the following:

Ebay and Paypal (who is owned by Ebay) have a team that investigates these fraudulent sites, but only if they're alerted to them. Since very few people forward these emails to Ebay and Paypal, they are unaware that a new fraud site has shown up. When you get one of these, forward the email, headers and all to snipped-for-privacy@paypal.com

Reply to
Odinn

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