posted on March 24, 2003 09:20:31 AM new
Has anyone else received an email from ebay saying basically "your feedback rating has earned you an orange fidelity star" and telling you to click a link and enter a promotion code contained in the email to be eligible for a "reward" of some kind.
I do tend to be skeptical about any email of this type, but this one looked really legit if it was a fake. Went to the ebay site and could find NOTHING about any kind of promo or scam involving this offer.
posted on March 24, 2003 02:56:46 PM new
Look, folks.
There's no way anyone can be expected to keep up with all the scammers sending mail "from eBay".
There's only ONE sure way to verify the origin of the mail, and I'm afraid that for some of you, it requires that you learn something.
Your mailer (whatever it is) has a feature that allows you to see the full headers of an email. This is true even of AOL, the least friendly of all mailers.
The headers show you where the email originated, where it was forwarded to from there, the next place it was forwarded to, and so on. The most recent destination (your server) is at the top, so you follow the chain backwards to the originating machine.
Some scammers know that headers can be read and give their machine a funky eBay-like hostname, like "cgii4ebay.com.foobar.com", which is an example from a scam email I got yesterday. The mail looked quite genuine in and of itself.
Check the headers. It's the only way to tell.
Oh, one more thing.
Go into My eBay and change your Preferences so that you DON'T get email begging you to participate in surveys and so forth. That'll lessen the confusion.
--
"I'm thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said `I drank WHAT?'"
posted on March 25, 2003 06:27:04 AM new
This email came to me from "[email protected]" and that was the ONLY source in the header. Still, I forwarded the whole thing to [email protected] and they got back to me this morning to verify that this was not from ebay and to let me know this is one of the latest ebay type scams that has cropped up. Surprisingly it was not a "canned" ebay form reply, but a personal email from a live body.
Apparently even ebay was impressed at how much this email and the link provided look like authentic ebay pages, but the scammers are attempting to harvest ebay user id's and passwords, presumably to get to other info. Even though I hadn't followed the link, I changed all my password info.
In any event, you guys were right on the money and if some other unsuspecting ebayer sees the subject line of this thread and has received a similar email, they'll be forewarned. Thanks for all your input!
