posted on July 19, 2003 04:24:13 AM new
I have now received 2 spoof emails Supposedly from eBay, fortunately I knew better to enter any information or even reply...
My question is this... with eBays "ask the seller" style of contact, how are these people getting the actual email address to send to?
posted on July 19, 2003 04:59:55 AM new
That's a good question, twelve. I've been getting a lot of these also. I wonder sometimes if it isn't people who have won auctions from me. They win an auction cheaply and they have your email address. Small price for some of them to pay to harvest passwords and email addresses. I think that's why I more leary of newbies than I have been before.
posted on July 19, 2003 05:59:03 AM new
there was a time robots can come to ebay and harvest email addr.
now they can just hire a kid to sit in front of the pc and do it manually.
posted on July 19, 2003 07:02:48 AM new
With tens of millions of ebay accounts out there now I don't think it's just ebay account holders getting these spoof emails. The hackers can just send millions of emails and hope a small percentage are ebay account holders.
Some hackers may take the time to compose lists of ebay sellers with their ebay ID and email address being the same and using the search engine. I entered the two words email me in quotes and got over 1.1 million results. Ebay would love to use this scam email crisis to get rid of the email address IDs but if a hacker can easily get a million email hits on their search engine maybe they will also try to get rid of all usage of emails in auction descriptions? That would surely cut deeply into the off site deals as well.
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posted on July 19, 2003 09:22:29 AM newI wonder sometimes if it isn't people who have won auctions from me. They win an auction cheaply and they have your email address.
More likely they ask a stupid question to get it. I had one from a person in Poland a few days ago that didn't make any sense. I just deleted it.
