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January 31, 2005
Mystery spam
Back when eBay was a pup, I may have established an account. But that would have been a long time ago. Yet today I get this provocative email:
FIP NOTICE: eBay Registration SuspensionDear eBay Member,
We regret to inform you that your eBay account has been suspended due to the violation of our site policy below:
False or missing contact information - Falsifying or omitting your name, address, and/or telephone number (including use of fax machines pager numbers, modems or disconnected numbers).
Due to the suspension of this account, please be advised you are prohibited from using eBay in any way. This prohibition includes the registering of a new account.
Please note that any seller fees due to eBay will immediately become due and payable.
eBay will charge any amounts you have not previously disputed to the billing method currently on file.you are required to verify your eBay account by following the link below.
http://signin.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?SignIn&ssPageName=h:h:sin:US
We appreciate your support and understating, as we work together to keep eBay a safe place to trade.
Thank you for your patience in this matter.
Respectfully,
Trust and Safety Department
eBay Inc.
Well, bust my britches. I'm altogether glad to know that eBay is a safe place to trade, and I'm sure I'll recover from the heartbreak of having my account suspended.
Posted by senioritis at January 31, 2005 04:21 PM
Comments
Did it really say "we appreciate your understating"? Because I think you may be *overstating* how excited you are about ebay. I got my microwave there when ebay was a zygote.
Posted by: aerobil at January 31, 2005 05:52 PM
Oh, and go look at the belly pics on my blog! I know how to do pictures now. woohooo!
Posted by: aerobil at January 31, 2005 05:53 PM
Hey, make sure you don't respond to that. I think that it may be one of those crappy let's steal your credit card information scams. Or I could just be watching too much local news.
Not that you seemed so broken up about the ebay that you were going to get right on it, anyway.
Posted by: jenwingard at January 31, 2005 07:34 PM
Interesting factoid: the email is filled with the appropriate icons (which of course can be readily copied). And the URL appears to be an eBay URL. So an alternative to your hypothesis, J: this may be a case of stolen identity. At least this time the bastards don't have my SSN. When that happened to me, they took out 3 credit cards in my name & maxed them out. Took me 2 years to get all that straightened out.
Posted by: senioritis at January 31, 2005 07:49 PM
'Tis spam. I've gotten that one a few times.
Posted by: Mike at January 31, 2005 08:09 PM
i'm voting for spam. the authenticators can be faked. that's how they fool people, the bastards.
Posted by: tyratae at January 31, 2005 10:14 PM
I got one a week or so ago telling me my PayPal account was to be terminated for lack of activity. Which was just fine with me, since I never set one up to begin with. It's definitely a spam thing.
Posted by: Chris Geyer at January 31, 2005 11:44 PM
I particularly like the "Trust and Safety Department" touch.
Posted by: senioritis at February 1, 2005 07:38 AM
This is a scam called "phishing". Although it appears legit, the link leads, not to the url you see, but to the scammer's input form. It is indeed a "steal your id" trick. I think they are so prevalent this year that HotNews put out a campus alert about not clicking that link. If you want to know whether you have an account or not, go to the real eBay by typing in their url.
clo
Posted by: clo at February 7, 2005 09:08 AM
I get spam just like that all the time purportedly from ebay and numerous other institutions that I have nothing to do with - obvious spam.
I also get mail like that purporting to be from PayPal. I have a PayPal account, but I know the mail is spam anyway, because it tells me to click to go to a specific page rather than to simply go directly to my account via the PayPal main page. (I also know that when PayPal writes to me, they always address me by name.)
You can pretty much take for granted that if they want you to click on a mail link rather than go to their legitimate front page first, they are trying to get to you through the biggest security hole any computer has, which is of course the user.
Posted by: Avedon at February 14, 2005 12:13 PM