There is an impressive phishing(stealing someone's identity by pretending to be from an authority site the potential victim uses) attempt email currently doing the rounds on eBay. Wary buyers and sellers already aware of several phishing attempts are now a lot more quick to delete and mark a suspicious email as spam. The scammers are aware of this and are always improvising with new methods to steal people's identities. The first step is to get their phishing attempt email into a user's mailbox, they may have obtained the user's email address from a previous sale, a previous query or from other scammers . The subject of the email may sound like a legit subject coming from eBay. A sample of the email is below:
You've received a question about eBay item #(Random item ID here)
Dear member,
How much is the shipping to Random place, Random country, Let me know because I'm online and I can pay you right now. - Inserted Powerseller ID
Did this answer your question? If not, let the seller know.
Item URL: [random url] Item Id: [random item ID] End time: random date Buyer:
Inserted Powerseller ID
There are some simple rules to identify that this is indeed a phishing attempt. First off i) It is addressed to a "dear member", eBay users should alredy be aware that their real names are usually included with any communication with eBay, to thwart just these type of scenarios.
ii) As usual the respond to link doesn't lead to eBay but to the Scammer's phishing site where the victim's login details will be harvested for the scammer's nefarious purposes if the mistake is made to login to the aforementioned url, which is what the entire phishing attempt was all about in the first place.
iii) The item url and item ID do not match, normally the item ID is located within the item url, the fact that the two are uncorrelated is a dead giveaway.
The Powerseller status ID inserted into the email is to give the idea of trust but in reality, the real Powerseller has no idea of any such item, nor that their name or account is being used for these purposes, and it may indeed be that the Powerseller themselves may have fallen victim to a phishing attempt, as it sometimes happens hence scammers use their usernames after obtaining their stolen details, in order to earn trust with the potential victim.
Author Resource:-
Mr D Stevens is a reviewer at Email scams
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