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May 06, 2005

(*Yet Another Ebay Scam)

I should have written this up before, but it's never too late to help put you on your guard. If you're an eBay seller—especially if you're just a casual seller—you may be surprised (and perhaps flattered) to receive an email purporting to come from eBay inviting you to become a PowerSeller. That's a status badge that sellers with very high volume and feedback ratings earn.

Con artists know that flattery gets them everywhere, so it shouldn't come as a shock to discover that this offer is a complete scam to get you to part with your eBay username and password. Hijacking an eBay account allows for a variety of scams (some of them detailed in Spam Wars) that, unfortunately, trick a fair number of eBay buyers who desperately want to get something that's too good to be true.

Behind the one bogus PowerSeller invitation spam I just saw is a form (in the email message) that gets submitted (after some indirection) to an AOL address, not to eBay. Oh, and the message originated from a wireless access point in Romania...a far cry from eBay's headquarters.

Are "they" really out to get you? You betcha!