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eBay Fraudulent Auctions aka Frauctions have been an issue for a long time.... just take a look at these posts dating 3 yeast back:
You would think that in three years eBay had time, energy, resources and interest to clean up their marketplace. Not much has changed. Those posts above sound way too familiar and eBay scammers are thriving on eBay scamming more money from Buyers than ever before. This page is created on 9/15/2006... it did not take me long to find a current eBay Scam victim who was just scammed - here is a post from 2 days ago: [Scam] Victim of Romania Ebay fraud just got scammed 9/13/2006 and this is just a drop in the ocean. No one has full figures but based on my personal observations I can estimate a range of 200 - 400 victims every month sending their hard earned money to the scammers and this is just my tip of an iceberg, based on my specific numbers in limited observation area I have. I suspect total numbers of fraud victims are staggering. Who are the eBay scammers? Well there is a division of labour, like in any organized outfit. You have the :
- Hackers whose job is to ferret internet servers, find those that are not secured properly and hijack those. Once hacker gains access to someone else unsecured server, they upload fake eBay looking websites so the Phishers can take over and do their part. (Often Hackers and Phishers are one and the same). Wanna meet one, say hello to Mr. Borcila Andra : Who are they ? Ebay Phisher, Meet and Greet !!
- Phishers then take over and start sending thousands of emails to internet users - these phishing emails change format all the time, one looks like an official email ASK Seller a Question type - but beware if you click on RESPOND button in that email you will end up at a PHISHER site, that looks just like eBAY Login Screen asking you to login with your eBay user name and password. Never - Ever respond to ASK a QUESTION by clicking any buttons in any EMAILs, go to your eBay account, click my messages and respond from your eBAY inbox.... unless of course you have 0 feedback like this account, then you cannot respond even from there... but that is another subject all together. Phishers will send you clever emails like this one [Phishing] E-bay phish disguised as survey as well as Unpaid Item notice ... so do not trust any emails, do all your communication via official eBay site in MY MESSAGES area.
- The Hackers and Phishers usually sell the hijacked eBay user logins/password to the Scammers. The Scammer's job is to upload as many Frauctions and coax the unuspecting eBay buyers into thinking they just found some expensive item at 1/3 of a going price and to convince the Buyer to contact the Scammer to an email address outside eBay and to coax the buyer to pay via unrefundable and untraceable cash method such as Western Union. Once the Victim sent money, the Scammer dissappears and the Victim never sees the item they think they bought.
Meet Zuzzy, one hacker/phisher who spoke out just recently, he/she/it will explain why they do it: Zuzzi tells you why it's OK to Scam Americans. Later on Zuzzy is joined by Dumi, the other Hacker/Phisher who explains that scamming from Americans is really not stealing at all.
How to spot a fake auction?
Well that is the EASY part! Read up on it in my SCAM Auctions WARNING Guide and then you can head on to a Real Time SCAM Auctions Tracker to check some of the SCAM Auctions on eBay right now. Also BEWARE there are SCAM Auctions converted to PHISHING right on eBAY pages, check out a Video Showing EBay Phishing right on eBay site. You will NEVER see a login on auction detail page, if you do, it is a PHISHING attempt, return to main eBAY page login there if you need to but never ever login on auction detail page, Scammers inject malicious code into auction pages that super-imposes fake login page layer into the auction to scam eBay users into giving up their user logins/password directly on eBay site.
So now what, what can YOU do?
- Be Informed, Beware! eBay maintains they are purely place to bring Buyers and Sellers together but they cannot police everything and everyone. They have a good point there. Here is a good link with more info how to protect yourself from SCAMS: Consumer Guide To Avoiding eBay Fraud.
- Take your eBay back! ... as eBay says, it is YOUR marketplace so YOU can make a difference. REPORT the obvious fraud to SAFE HARBOR to help eBay remove the Scam auctions quickly.... it that is all eBay is willing to do for now... act upon our Reports. Take action, be creative, there is no rule against SCAM BAITING the obvious scammers, and spinning their wheels, emailing them from YOUR OWN free hotmail/yahoo email account, posing as a buyer asking them questions so they will be busy answering your questions about their frauctions and hopefully your Scammer will have less time luring the unsuspecting eBay novices into their fake transactions. They want an off eBay contact - well let them have off eBay contact. There are over 60,000,000 unique visitors to eBay every month, if a tiny little portion of us decides to send a few emails to the Scammers every so often, these quys will be so swamped answering our Scam Baits... you get the picture.
Scammers most important tool is their mailbox! All Frauctions aks eBay buyers to email the Seller - this is the core of the Scam - SO LET'S ALL EMAIL THEM!.
- create your own special email addresses on two or three on free email accounts like yahoo.com hotmail.com mail.com - you do not want to email the Scammers from your real email address. You may want to change those email addresses once a while as the scammers may recognize your Scam Baiting email addy from previous communications.
- identify those Frauctions correctly! YOU MUST BE SURE THE AUCTION IS FAKE - DO NOT HARRASS REAL SELLERS! The Seller - real Seller is a victim of PHISHING, they do not even know the Scammer uploaded auctions to their account. Harrassing the Seller would defeat the purpose scam baiting. We want to keep eBay safe en enjoyable for us but make it HellBay for the scammers only.
- pick 10 or 20 or as many scammers email addresses from current frauctions. Each escammer has at least 20 to 30 if not more scam email addresses so pick different looking Frauctions to assure you are reaching variety of Scammers not just the same one who has hijacked 10 different sellers and has 10 different email addresses. NEVER use the official Contact the Seller link on eBay auction!!!! You would be contacting the real seller who is also a Victim, his account was hijacked by the Scammer. Only use the email address provided in the description of the Frauction.
- email them short letter of interest, just like you would to a real seller, ask questions about the item, about the auction - here is a nice example of Scam Bait Correspondance,
- that's it - simple as that. eBay has over 60,000,000 unique visitors per month many of whom are now victims of this fraud. If one tenth of one percent of us sent 1 question to 10 current email scam addresses active on eBay, those scammers would be overwhelmed by answering SCAM BAIT emails and would not be able to even keep up. You know how it feels if you have to answer 3000 emails per day? Well the scammer ring I am currently tracking now logs about 400 email addresses advertised in Frauctions. They add about 10 new fresh email addresses per day to seed their Frauctions with fresh email contact address because their oldest ones are getting shut down by yahoo/aol/hotmail/compuserve.... The idea is to flood their email addresses with real looking Frauction interest emails so they are busy answering YOUR emails and never get to answer real Victim's emails because they cannot keep up.
- from our statistics each of the 400 scam email addresses gets about one Victim per month scammed for an average of $1000 - do the math!
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