16. March 2006 · Comments Off on New kind of phishing, or what? · Categories: General

Of all the crazy emails I”ve gotten over the years, of people phishing for info, this most recent one floored me. I just got an email, purporting to be from EBay, appearing to be sent from their “ask ebay member a question” thing.

Subject line was: Question for item #5880058165 – PANASONIC 50 TH-50PHD8UK PLASMA TELEVISION IN STOCK

Message was: This message was sent while the listing was active.
Hey are you going to buy the unit or not??? It appears to me that you’re nothing but a fraud!! I’m reporting you to ebay !

Naturally, I was confused, since I’ve not bid on any EBay items in over a year. So I pulled up full headers, and forwarded it to spoof@ebay.com.

Then, while typing this post, I thought — Hmmm…. let me just go look… here’s the link to the listing for the item referenced.

It had zero bids, and was removed by seller due to an error. So obviously the email I got was bogus. What I originally feared was that someone was using my ebay account to bid on things. But that can’t be, because the email I got didn’t come to my registered EBay email address. It came to the email address that’s registered with my PayPal account.

I hate phishers.

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