They state " RKOEBAYSUPORT@EBAY.COM Your bid has been cancle click this link to see why. it will give an auction number I went to ebay serch on another page and entered the auction number in and it was nothing I ever bidded on so that was my second hint I foward email to spoof@ebay.com . I felt something was wrong from word go I always check another way befor I click on a link if I’m not sure its who it says it is if you goto any of the other links you will see this warning as I’m going to put it in all forums.
Thanks William for posting this. [:)]
Some of the modelers will remember when I started a warning like this some time back. However, it was too late for a few people and it caused them much grief.
Please people, don’t responde to an email like this. You are at great financial risk if you do so. These people are after your passwords and other info they can find in your computer.
Play it safe and don’t click on any links in an email from anyone you do not know. You can check them out by going to the website and doing some homework on your own.
AND please report any bogus emails you get. Let’s rid the internet of these spinless thieves.
As a general rule, don’t respond to any email saying they are from “ebay.com” or your ISP, or your bank stating there is a problem. Don’t “access your account” through the link provided on any email. If you want to access your account, type in the known web address of ebay, your ISP, bank, or whoever to do so.
A couple of clues are misspelled words in the email, using the wrong domain (.com when your ISP uses .net) or rolling your cursor over the link provided and seeing some convoluted web address come up, or a set of numbers (an IP address, which would look something like 192.168.10.65).
In general, nobody is going to give you a link to directly access your account. They would tell you to access the account yourself and verify the information, if that was really needed.
The e-bay one is only one of several scams of this nature. Go to: http://www.snopes.com/ Do a search on the word e-bay and several similar scams will come up. I always check these out at sites like Snopes.com before I answer e-mails of this sort. Even going to the website listed in their e-mail to tell them to get lost can sometimes give them info from your computer (like: yep that is a working e-mail address - then they send you hundreds of “offers” a month).
thanks guys,good call !
There is something else that everyone needs to realize as well. Even if you mistakenly
“click” on one of these links, then leave the site without doing anything, you may be in trouble.
Todays internet phishers do just that by phishing, to get you to click and go to some bogus site. Realize however, that these crooks have gotten to the point where you don’t have to do anything once you mistakenly GO THERE. Some sites will ‘plant’ spyware on your PC almost as soon as you go to one of these bogus sites. Even if you don’t DO anything at the site, and leave immediately, you might have infected your PC with a program that can install itself on your PC, then monitor your keystrokes and send that information back over the internet to the creep that planted created the spyware. These programs have gotten very sophisticated in the past year.
The internet has given con men a new tool to rip us off. Be careful where you surf.
JohnT14808,
I am somewhat of a computer expert. And you are 100% correct. All you have to do is click on the email without even opening the link and you are done. There is really no way to rid yourself of Spyware. We all have it and you may never know it’s there. It can be something as easy at this sight. Everyone that opens it will get it. My rule is DELETE ALL email unless I know it’s comming or I am 100% sure I know who it is. If I have a virus and don’t know it everyone I come in contact with will get it. It’s that simple. I run a very good virus program that will scan my emails and stop anything that trys to get into my system, it will ask me if I want to let it through or not. Just be carefull. It’s like a 120 car train with a BIG BOY at the lead loosing it’s air comming down Shermon Hill [xx(]
Thats why I didn’t open it I just sent it to ebay as it had item # in the heading
The junk mail / spyware stuff is out of control.
I basically only OPEN emails where I know either a) the sender, or b) it’s obvious from the title that I want to read it, and that someone sent it specifically to me.
I used to work at a company where I got about 50 junk email messages per day. The network administrator had his hands full keeping the system clean.
Sad, but true. Only open email from friends, colleagues, clients, etc. Please don’t open anything else. You may regret it.
You are not 100% safe opening emails from people you DO know. If they have it there is no way of them knowing it or you until it’s to late. Nothing is 100% safe anymore.
Very true 8500 - but you have a better chance opening email from people you know than from a complete stranger.
I am baffled by the intelligent people I know who forward hoaxes ,etc. We had an embarrassing moment at a company I worked at several years ago where an executive type (read, 120k or so salary - 7 or 8 years ago) forwarded a silly hoax and swore the thing in the hoax happened to a “friend of a friend”. I immediately did a search and found it was a hoax.
You cannot believe what you read in emails these days!
And yes, you’re not safe. We’re all hedging our bets using this crazy internet!
ANY email from eBay that does not specifically address you (they say “Dear eBay member” or some other nonsense) are FAKE. ALWAYS.
Same with PayPal. If it says “Dear PayPal Member” instead of you specifically, its bogus. DO NOT click anything in it. EVER.
My ‘favorites’ are the ones from banks with which I don’t even do business. Oh really, Bank of America is having a problem with my account? MAYBE BECAUSE I DON’T HAVE ONE THERE!
I used to send in all the bogus eBay and PayPal ones, but I get so many anymore I don’t even bother. Sometimes I poke arond in the source code tot he email to see where it’s REALLY redirecting me, and try to get some info on the site, but usually they are just robot sites dumped onto someone’s legitimate web server that wasn;t properly secured. So even reporting them doesn’t do much - they might get THAT particular company to fix their wide open server, but it rarely leads to the actual culprits.
IMO, a lifetime ban from EVER using a computer isn’t stiff enough punishment for phishers and spammers. Try hosting your own mail server liek I do and se how you feel about spammers. I don’t see 99% of what come sin, I have filtering software that works very well. ALthough it DID block my confirmation for winning Tony’s $5 off the other day - after I specifically allowed their domain I asked them to resend it so I could claim my $5 and order something, but a week later, no response. 
Anyway - I get THOUSANDS of spam message, directed at accounts that don;t even exist on my domain - just the same message to a random list of common names. It really eats into my bandwidth. I probably loose thousdands of dollars a month in lost productivity, since I work from home and this affects my work as well as ‘fun’ time.
–Randy
This scam is not really new – I’ve been receiving these periodically for the past couple of years now. The key to the fact that it’s a fraud is the misspelled words in the message. I get messages like this sometimes that ask for bank account number confirmation, austensibly from banks that I have never heard of and certainly don’t have an account with them.
There are obviously enough fools in the world who respond to these messages and provide the requested account information for these scammers to steal money from bank accounts, or these messages wouldn’t be floating around.
There was a recent items in the local newspaper about a woman who stupidly believed the Canadian Lottery scam and sent $3,000 to claim her prize. The check she received from a lottery that she had never entered turned out to be bogus.
Unfortunately, we’re never going to rid the world of these idiots (I’ve got better names to describe them, but I can’t use them in polite company [;)]). We have to protect ourselves and live in walled cities (or at least our computers do). As many people above have said, don’t even open an e-mail from someone you don’t know. I’ve got a firewall that doesn’t let anything in or out without my permission, an up-to-date virus scanner, a spam blocker, a banner and popup blocker, a worm blocker, a spyware blocker and eliminator and a phony e-mail address at the top of my address book to stop a worm from using it. Some of my friends think I’m paranoid; I think I’m (relativly) safe. Better to be safe than sorry. This software is out there for us to use, and much of it is even free.
I’ve never had one of these, though my mum frequently gets them - I’ve given the same instructions as above - don’t open, just delete. The amusing ones are when a bank she doesn’t hold an account with supposedly wants her to login and “confirm her details”…
I agree there needs to be better enforcement and stiffer penalties against these bottom-feeders - at the moment they can defraud people, slow down or crash servers, and cause tech support people hours of problems with little or no chance that they will be caught. These “people” are the reason that I have to slow my PC down with a firewall, virus scanner, spyware killer, popup blocker, etc.
Emails get deleted on sight. If it is from a family or friend etc then I will scan it and check out the information contained in the mail.
I run quite a few programs designed to catch all manner of trouble. Networks that get caught delivering troublesome problems (Virus, worms etc) gets ARIN’d (There are 5 Global Internet Address directories) and blocked at the firewall at the network address and subnet mask range.
I view my logs daily and execute scans, maintainence etc often.
Ebay, paypal, banks etc… They go straight to the trash bin unread. If they want to personally close my account they have to target me directly by other means besides email. If my bank wants to deal with me they usually do in person as I visit it several times a month.
There are emails with a subject line containing your last name and invites you to learn more about your family history. I had one of these last year and I fell for it. Luckily I was running a second computer as a test and it had nothing but Linux on that disk. If it was my regular machine I would probably have been “stripped” like a sports car in a bad neighborhood in a new york minute.
The internet is full of good things, unfortunately the bad and the ugly as well.
A friend of mine has a really nice setup with his email. If you email him, his systems responds back requesting an email with a specific word as the first letter of the email.
When you re-send an email with that word in there, his email system will recieve it. You are then added to his “approved senders” list, and your emails sent from your email address will always get through in the future.
So you basically have to get “setup” to be able to send him emails. Works like a charm - keep all junk from getting to him, because computers aren’t smart enough to follow his instructions to send him junk.
Nice, huh?
He’s also in the computer business, so he’s totally on top of this stuff.