Scam Alert: Fake eBay emails

It seems to be a monthly problem these days. I get fake eBay emails about once or twice a month. How do I know it’s a fake? Well for starters, I use another email address for eBay. And also, Hotmail dumped the fake email into my Junk Mail folder. These criminals prey on all people regardless of race, ethnicity, country of origin, nationality, sex, gender, etc BUT the only victims are the elderly and the vast not-quite-overly-well informed crowd.

How to tell fake eBay messages from the real deal:

1. If it goes to your Junk Mail folder on Yahoo/Google/Hotmail, it’s a fake. Can’t verify other email account types but the filters on those 3 are very consistent.

2. Does it look fake? I know most scam artists have taken a lot of time to make sure their emails look like the real deal but then there are always the few fools that go around without even trying.

3. Check the domain name of the sender. This can be spoofed easily but if the domain ain’t right, the email ain’t what it claims to be. What is the “domain” or how do we identify it? It’s the last word before the “.com” or “.org” etc. The one in my email says “ebay8109.com” but if it had said “ebayupdates.com” or “ebaynews.com”, quite a few ppl would’ve gotten conned.

4. As you can see, the scammer/spammer mailed it to a bunch of ppl and it comes up showing as “undisclosed recipients” instead of my email address.

5. If you’ve followed my steps from the previous post, you shouldn’t be getting emails from scam artists to your account that handles your online purchasing.

If you look up the ebay user “smiths” account, you can see that the last time Smith Bilger’s account was used was on Jan 07, 2007. That’s enough to worry anybody. So next time you get an email like this, what you need to do is … look up the profile of the person who’s sending it.

Open a new tab or window on your web-browser and type in http://myworld.ebay.com/ and then enter the name of the user after the / and then hit ENTER!

… a sad twist to all this is that there are many ways to have a false sender’s domain name show up on the screen. It gets a bit technical and more IT experts are working hard to double check with the source of the IP and associated domain name tagged with it. Otherwise, anybody could spoof a domain name. I could send you an email with “Bill.Gates@microsoft.com” as the sender but that’s not going to happen.

If you really think you need to check your eBay account or Yahoo for password renewals etc, open a new browser. Do NOT click CTRL+N or CTRL+T for a new window or new tab. Double-click on the icon of the browser you wish to open and then type in http://www.yahoo.com or http://www.ebay.com or google.com etc and see if there is anything needed to be done there like changing a password, responding to a complaint, etc.

Thank you and have a good weekend!