Ebay Spam

I wonder what E-bay does to try and stop phishers from leaching off of their membership.  Seems like a problem they would want to solve. 

Gretchen and I recently used Ebay to sell some stuff and incurred the seller fees.  Maybe we were ignorant. I just assumed that they would deduct form my paypal account automatically.  Soon after our auctions we started getting phishing mails that looked like real ebay bills.  The real bill also was delivered during this stretch, but we deleted it... on the assumption it was another scam mail. 

So ebay lost out on payment from us for a couple of months until I signed in again and realized we owed them money.  Doesn't sound like much, but if the story is common enough that's money they are losing out on.

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 01, 2007
  Down with eBay, up with Craig's List. I've had nothing but issues with eBay for a while now, and finally deleted my account a few months ago.

• Anonymous
  March 01, 2007
  Plain and simple, the phishers are using email addresses they got from address lists they bought. There's nothing eBay can do about this. All they can do is ensure that their site doesn't expose email addresses (which I don't think it does), that they include your username in communications (which presumably would be hard for a spammer to match to your email address), and to ensure that the URLs used in emails point to a secure site (now with Extended Validation certificates). From your side, if you have the capability, you could create a dedicated email address for eBay communications. If something purporting to be from eBay arrives on any other address, it's a phish. You can probably trust that anything that arrives on the dedicated address is actually from eBay (unless they've had a disclosure of their user database).

• Anonymous
  March 01, 2007
  The comment has been removed