Alert! Very tricky very EVIL new eBay SPOOF scam that almost had me fooled! Beware!
My e-mail blockage has finally been cleared again, yay 8D! I got 128 new messages, MEEP! Among those messages, I found a new VERY suspicious e-mail that supposedly came from bidconfirm@ebay.com, which is eBay's account for sending bid confirmations. At the top, it said I had placed a bid on eBay auction #220016866696, a lot of Imation data cartridges, for a high bid of $33.00 o-O! I never even heard of this auction until I got the e-mail. Word-for-word, the e-mail looked like a genuine bid confirmation e-mail from eBay. I quickly checked the auction and found I had never bid on it nor does my eBay ID show up on the bid history record. I thought my password had been compromised or something until I examined the e-mail more closely. Luckily, my account is a wonderful ancient system that's TEXT only, so I saw the raw contents of the message including funny HTML links. I set my preferences in eBay to send messages in text form only, so it really didn't match my other bid confirmations I got from eBay. The message was in HTML, so that should have put me on alert already --;! All the links embedded in the message lead to some phony website, which I didn't visit, but I do know it's not part of eBay. I suspect the SPOOF message hopes that you panic when you see this bid confirmation from an auction that you never heard of and click on the links in the message to undo the bid wherein you'll give the scammer ALL the information he needs to hack you >8(!
Why am I posting this? Normally, it's pretty easy to spot a SPOOF message, but even I was almost fooled by this in my text only environment. Because my e-mail is in a text only environment though, I have no incentive whatsoever to click on whatever links may be in the e-mail since clicking on them would be useless. I suspect if you have modern fancy e-mail accounts that can handle HTML though, it would look very similar to what you normally get from eBay. According to the HTML coding, it even has the same horizontal lines and messages eBay usually sends with their e-mail bid confirmations so be careful! Even the pictures are from eBay's own website so as to not raise suspicion! If you get one of these messages, don't click on anything in the e-mail and check using eBay's website itself on the auction, bid history, your bid history, etc. first, and then forward the e-mail to spoof@ebay.com. One can never be too careful about links in e-mail messages these days! If you already know about this scam, then never mind me --;!
Why am I posting this? Normally, it's pretty easy to spot a SPOOF message, but even I was almost fooled by this in my text only environment. Because my e-mail is in a text only environment though, I have no incentive whatsoever to click on whatever links may be in the e-mail since clicking on them would be useless. I suspect if you have modern fancy e-mail accounts that can handle HTML though, it would look very similar to what you normally get from eBay. According to the HTML coding, it even has the same horizontal lines and messages eBay usually sends with their e-mail bid confirmations so be careful! Even the pictures are from eBay's own website so as to not raise suspicion! If you get one of these messages, don't click on anything in the e-mail and check using eBay's website itself on the auction, bid history, your bid history, etc. first, and then forward the e-mail to spoof@ebay.com. One can never be too careful about links in e-mail messages these days! If you already know about this scam, then never mind me --;!