Strange Message From Ebay Member

This morning I opened my Email page to see the following in a message from an ebay member;

There are 8 months since you did not responded to my emails . I will report you to ebay , PayPal and FBI if you continue to ignore me .

- asleyj88

I have had no dealings at all with this person, they are in Germany and have zero feedback, I think it is a phishing attempt to get me to click on links in the message. The part that bugs me is that the message came in on an old email account I no longer use for ebay, I am sure it is a spoof. How do I report it to ebay? I went in circles for 30 minutes trying to get to a place where I could report this person, but ebay doesn't seem to have any mechanism I can find to do so. Any suggestions?

Maybe forward email to abuse@ebay.com

I once received an similar email from German ebay, though not threatening FBI reporting I think. I just ignored it.

This message was not sent via ebay even though it proports to be from another user. It is a phishing scam designed to try to get you to log into a fake ebay site in order to get your userID and password. Forward the message to: spoof@ebay.com

Brian

Thanks all- I have reported it. Gosh if someone wants to do phishing wouldn't you think they'd do a better job?

People fall for it every day. You were unsure enough that you posted it here.

A popular economist once pointed out that messages with outrageous content like this are actually more efficient for the scam artist. With a truly outrageous message, 99.999% of receivers won't reply. But the 0.001% who do ... the scammer's success rate with them will be north of 80%. This is one reason phishing messages tend to be so bizarre; they weed out anyone who is sensible, and only the truly gullible take the bait, and are taken.

I don't bother forwarding messages like this for investigation. ebay and other sites establish addresses like "abuse" for public relations purposes, but no one monitors them or takes any action, unless a particular scam goes viral for some reason and the site is held out for ridicule in social media. You're on your own.

ebay does indeed monitor the Spoof@ address as does Paypal.

ALWAYS GO IN THE FRONT DOOR <= simple, effective security precaution.

Even if the eMail is from a bank/vendor where I actually *do* have an account, I always hand-type www.{YourBankGoesHere}.com and proceed to the message center. I never use the convenient link(s), thoughtfully provided, in the eMail.

I mean, like, you know, what could be dumber than *that*?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Spoofing the 'From' line in any email is pretty easy to do; making it appear to a casual observer that it came from someone you know. But it is a lot harder to modify the rest of the email header itself. So one way to take a closer look at where the email really originated from is to open the email in a text editor instead of your email application. This will expose the entire email header and you do not risk launching any attachments or malicious code. You will have to sort through the header and look closely but you should be able to determine if the email came from the source that you expect or not.
Don