Almost daily, i receive messages with false from-addresses originating from eBay asking me to update my account. The scammers sending these, hope that I won’t read too carefully, click on the link and submit all my secret eBay info.
Some of the e-mails are even quite good, and could have fooled me, if I had an eBay account, which I don’t.
False text messages
The best of these scam mails are pretending to be in a text format, when they are acutally in the form of an html coded mail looking like plain text. But when you highlight the text, you notice white, invisible text gibberish within the mail. And, the url of the link will, of course, not lead to eBay, but to a server with an url containing ebay-customer-admin, that has nothing to do with ebay.com. The technique is called phishing, and the mail is the bait and you the catch.
Just a couple of minutes ago, I got this one, from the ”eBay Validation Center”:
From: Billing Department admin@ebay.com
Date: mån aug 30, 2004 15:34:12 Europe/Stockholm
To: my standard e-mail address
Subject: eBay Validation Center [ERR448]Dear eBay customer,
During our regularly scheduled account maintenance and verification procedures, we have detected a slight error in your billing information.
This might be due to either of the following reasons:
sihazn qpba zslpkpwi bxgv
A recent change in your personal information ( i.e.change of address).
2. Submiting invalid information during the initial sign up process.
3. An inability to accurately verify your selected option of payment due to an internal error within our processors.
Please update and verify your information by clicking the link below:
[this is where the url used to be. I deleted it]
ttfxq atxrk uwmzwz oheod
If your account information is not updated within 48 hours then your ability to sell or bid on eBay will become restricted.
Thank you
The eBay Billing Deptartment.
Now, the headers of the mail looks like this, and has, of course nothing at all to do with eBay. Instead it is a RoadRunner (rr.com) account:
From admin@ebay.com Mon Aug 30 15:46:51 2004
Return-Path: admin@ebay.com
Delivered-To: my path, but deleted here
by nw-pop4.wineasy.se (Postfix) with ESMTP id D6122348
[for more deleted stuff]; Mon, 30 Aug 2004 15:45:07 +0200 (MET DST)
Received: from alb-69-200-43-195.nycap.rr.com (alb-69-200-43-195.nycap.rr.com [69.200.43.195])
by nw-smtp-03.wineasy.se (Postfix) with SMTP id 00E5D40088
for [another deletion of my address]; Mon, 30 Aug 2004 15:40:03 +0200 (CEST)
Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 13:34:12 +0000
From: Billing Department admin@ebay.com
To: yup, my address
Subject: eBay Validation Center [ERR448]
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=Windows-1251
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
So there. Don’t click on these things if you get them!
