Ebay scam burned my friend
 

My friend was buying a horsetrailer from Ebay. It had a buy it now price and the seller, who showed he accepted paypal, had something within the text indicating to contact he via email address and NOT go through ebay/paypal. My friend wired him $2500 (which was such a dumbass thing to do!) and now has lost the money. The FBI are now involved. I went to looking on Ebay and there are still several more auctions like that under different seller names but the text is the same and the pictures are too. So- to all those that buy on Ebay- BEWARE!! I would hate to hear that any of us got ripped off like this. $2500 is a heck of a lot of money to lose. I am still mad over my son getting ripped off for $15!!! A dollar is a dollar and can be used towards other things. I hate a damned thief!!!

E-bay is not the good place it once was, far too many crooks.
They don't really advertise that well on e-bay, they need a warning label a front explaining that crooks do exist on e-bay.
But to trust someone for $2500 over e-bay, when God knows who is on the other end?
Talk about a hard lesson.
Tell him not to talk about getting ripped, cause people will be smart alec about it.

ive noticed alot of them on ebay where they say to contact them through a dif email adress.... i figured most of themn if not all of them are scams. like i found one for a 2004 gxsr 750 for 2500 buy it now. and it said the guy was in ohio... so i was likke sweet. so i emailed him though ebay and he emailed me back saying to email him through this adress. well i emailed him back and he said he was in england and i would have to pay for shipping to the us... but the listing stated he was in ohio and if you tranfer it to someon outa the country good luck doing anything about getin it back,

Agreed! I used to love ebay, but now you have to be very cautious. I just had my ebay account 'hijacked' last week. All is fixed now.

I think somebody was keylogging my computer (only thing I can think of) because I had 2 unauthorized motorcycle listings under my account 4 minutes after I had placed a bid for an item??? Only thing that tipped me off was an email from an interested buyer. Very strange.

Anyway, ebay was quick about it and luckily I didn't have to pay nearly $700 in listing fees.

My friend has purchased cars and such without any problems until this happened. The tip off was when he tried to get a tracking number and the guy said Ebay never gave him one. At least if it went through paypal there would have been some recourse. A very hard lesson to live and learn from.

How bout a link to one of the "bad ads" so we know what to look for.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...5415%26fvi%3D1

This link is one of the ones. They get removed pretty quickly by Ebay. These people sell stuff like horsetrailers, cameras, boats, motorcycles. Any high dollar items like that.

how did he get all those good reviews? maybe doing transfers with friends and not even spending money or trailers....thats really bad...i didnt care about the xbox problem because they clearly state they are selling boxes but this is just plain out stealing money.

I think it is an inside job. They would have access to photos, etc and are trying to burn people. They will be caught but they change identities quickly and if you contact them about an auction they will close it or if Ebay catches it they will end it.

Just Beware!!!

Sheesh, that's so obvious that its a scam. As soon as they say "do not go through ebay" blah blah... yea, real easy to tell.

Now I'm not saying all ebay sellers are good news, but remember that a lot of ebay accounts are hijacked. Don't neccessarily hate the sellers, hate the hijackers!

The same thing happened to my account (read above).

Yea they are quick that link is allready dead!
Thanks anyway. It's just that I'm looking for a car trailer and I'm afraid of getting them.

Because of hijacking and other things, you and some others would probably feint if they saw the kind of passwords I use ;)

This is off topic in a sense, but I want to share some thoughts:

I'm going to jump on a soapbox here for a moment as this touches on what I do for living. It has been statistically proven that 95% of people who actively connect to the Internet use poor security practices at best.

How many people use either one or two weak passwords for the majority of thier authentication keys? That nice Citibank Online password? Same as your login to BC!! That Pr0n site we all know you use? Same password as your Savings and Loan. (Would scare you to death if you realized how many people with a prior criminal record operate illicit websites.)

Please folks, consider using multiple strong passwords containing both alpha and numeric characters, as well as a few special characters. Change your passwords every 30-60 days. It would really suck to find out that one of my BC family was wiped out by a SSN, Social Engineering, or Weak Password attack.

FYI: Social Engineering for those who are not familiar with the term is quite simply asking for information. You'd be surprised how easy you're willing to give up your proper name, address, SSN, and passwords.

Thanks Mortehl for sharing the information. I too am in the field of IT (computer junkie) and you make some very good points on internet security.

Scary thing is my ebay password was a very strong password using lower case, upper case, numbers and special characters. That's why I believe somebody was keylogging. But I think I've secured that from happening again... I hope.

Gah. Other people have access to your 'puter? And do you share the passsword with other websites? Hell, do you use the password as your shell or ftp login for any personal web hosting? I had one very interesting case about a year ago with my wife. She used a very good password on her private web hosting which was on another company's server (long story) and someone (who I actually later tracked down to be in the viscinity of Prague) employed a dictionary attack. Because the server was not properly secured, the attack literally ran for I think 7 or 8 straight days before it was nailed.

Well.. long story short, she used the same password to access an image server I host for her. Found some asshole attempting to rootkit the box from her login. BIG mistake because I tracked the bastard down.

Back to your computer. You want to run programs that log all registry changes and review them periodically. Watch your system32 directory for files that have recently been added. (dir/o:d is your friend ;)) Shut and LOCK your system down.

I'm sure you know all this, but I'm putting it out there for those who don't.

Thanks Mortehl for the advice. I know you are right but it is such a pain sometimes to have to know a hundred different passwords and change them so much. At work alone I have 4 or 5 that have to be changed every 90 days and have to be no less than 8 characters with numbers, letters, some caps, etc. It is very specific what it will allow. I can't keep up with it all. I will try to do better.

i use four different passwords. one is a pain in the ass, the others are so easy that they could probably be guessed, much less survive an app attack. i just dont care. theres not a single thing i do online that contains important information for me. all my bills are paid thru a check in the mail, i dont order things online, and i dont even have a webpage anymore. my computers been hacked a number of times, mostly viruses and such. my antivirus is fdisk.

on a sidenote... how cool would that be on a tshirt? - "fdisk is my anti-virus."

I pay most of my bills online at work because they have the most up to date protection.