(P)fishing In Ebay Message System

I was surprised to see this pop up today among my ebay messages. I thought the ebay message system was safe, but I guess not, so watch out folks!

wow that's weird, junk mail solicitation it seems. ebay must have made a buck somewhere. Disappointing.

-J

I would report this person to ebay pronto and add them to your ban list if you haven't already.

The world is full of trickery.
How the Australian federal election invaded your inbox with email tracking tools.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science...ion/11056186

Sounds like they are capturing your ebay listing and adding it to their site {their site may be nothing more than listing it on ebay in another country } then when it sells a invoice from them will follow .Just tell them your not interested .

Notice his account is unrated on ebay.

And people wonder why this community has a 50 post rule about emailing others. Hopefully folks will remember this thread next time they push back on the forum rule.

Of course ebay does not have the luxury of having this rule since when transactions are involved you have to allow people to communicate with each other.

Does anyone here have any good ideas on how ebay could prevent people from using their account to spam others?
Don

P.S. Hi Ken, the term is 'phishing' not fishing.

Not a good look + 0 feedback! Can get paranoid over this stuff but it is really just a part of life these days. We all have to be very careful. And we need to watch out for the older ones we know! Their so at risk to the scammers.

I Agree report them. Big Time!

In South West Florida "fishing" is king, so I guess I have an excuse.

I did call ebay and report the problem. They told me to forward it to ebay.spoof but I had to point out to the phone rep. there is no forwarding capability in the ebay messaging system.

Could ebay run the attached images thru a filter to make sure they wenen't a link?

Another one received today from a new account created yesterday. I had reported similar messages to ebay in early March and again in April. If ebay took action, it must have been ineffective.

I received one just like that a couple of days ago, from a different user from Ukraine registered that day. I tried to report it right from the message but couldn't find out how (I thought there used to be a link right in the message). I think the report I ended up submitting was more generic. As of now they have not been suspended from ebay.

What feasible action(s) can ebay can take in this kind of exploitation?

We have been discussing for years that ebay does not actually vet new accounts. How would ebay (or anyone else) actually verify each person who opens a new account? How would they detect a person who is using false information to open an account? How would they prevent someone from using a VPN or some other method to mask their real identity?

And as I mentioned above, ebay cannot simply disallow the use of their messaging system for a new account. New accounts have legitimate reasons for using the ebay messaging system (i.e to ask about a listing etc.).

System exploitations occur all around us. As soon as any system becomes popular, it will attract those who will exploit it. It does not matter if we are talking about a legal system, a taxation system, a government benefits system or the ebay messaging system; there are people who have nothing better to do than sit around 24/7 and figure out ways to exploit it.

In this specific case, ebay has no technical way to prevent someone from doing this. At best they can only be reactionary and close the account(s) after the spam has occurred.
Don

Don,

The spam I received asked me to click the link in the attached image, can't ebay filter for images with links?

ebay almost never suspends accounts. I've seen accounts with 0 feedbacks and 5 Unpaid item strikes not get suspended.

Hi Ken,
The ebay messaging system filters all links now but they have figured out how to exploit this. I noticed in your first post that there appears to be delimiters between each word, I suspect this is part of the exploit. I do not have the time to go visit the 'dark web' to see if I can learn how they are doing this (I used to stay abreast of the 'seedy underbelly' of the hacker world but only when I had the time to setup virtual machines because so many of these online places are fully of all kinds of nasty code.
Don

Very timely warning about what we do on line Don. Thank you!

I got another one of these phishing messages through the ebay messaging system today. ebay's instructions for these are;




I have no idea how to attach an ebay message to an email. I went to my email Inbox and thought I'd forward the message to ebay.spoof but these phishing messages don't show up in my regular email as all my other message do. Anyone have any ideas?

Ken