eBay Unpaid Item Dispute for Item - Response Required - is the Newest eBay Phishing Attempt   11/27/2007 - 1,806 views, 4 Comments

Summary: Countless people have received email which appears to come from eBay, with the rather alarming message "eBay Unpaid Item Dispute for Item", adding to the urgency with "Response Required". If you get one of these and your first response is "Huh? I don't have any open items for sale at eBay" or even "Huh? I don't have an eBay account", you're not alone. Because this is the newest phishing attempt to spoof eBay.

Previous Article « Christmas Music on the Internet with Online Radio Stations Playing Christmas Music
Read Next Article » How to Make Money on eBay as an eBay Seller without Having to Sell Things on eBay! (Or How to Put eBay Listings on Your Website) Also: What a Commission Junction PID Number is, and Where to Find Your CJ PID Number!

Countless people have received email which appears to come from eBay, with the rather alarming message “eBay Unpaid Item Dispute for Item”, adding to the urgency with “Response Required”.

If you get one of these and your first response is “Huh? I don’t have any open items for sale at eBay” or even “Huh? I don’t have an eBay account”, you’re not alone. Because this is the newest phishing attempt to spoof eBay.

When you see it in your email, it looks like this:

pastedGraphic.png

But watch what happens when we deconstruct it to it’s actual html elements - here is what the html in the email is hiding. Most import, note how the links which appear to go to eBay actually go to the phishers destination. We have highlighted that data by putting it in bold red text:

Subject: eBay Unpaid Item Dispute for Item #230151535423– Response Required
From: eBay
Reply-To:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

eBay sent this message to Eduard Martin (sivertsenb).
Your registered name is included to help confirm this message originated from eBay.

< a href="http://www.unl.edu.ec/feue/mambots/editors/ z/" rel=nofollow >Learn more. < /a>

eBay Unpaid Item Dispute for Item #230151535423– Response Required


eBay member, lamotteboy, has indicated that they already paid for #230151535423.

< a href="http://www.unl.edu.ec/feue/mambots/ editors/z/" target=_blank rel=nofollow > Review payment details < /a>

Thank you,

eBay

Remember, always, always, always go right to your eBay account and log in to it, and check there, rather than clicking on links that come in email like this. If eBay has something to tell you, it will be in your account on the website.

Get FREE email alerts of new Internet Patrol stories!
    *We never share your email address with anyone

Email Address:
Date of first visit:
How you found us:

Subscribe
to The Internet Patrol on your cell phone    Email the link for this page to a friend!

Read more:

»  eBay Phishing Bug Allows Phishing Using Real eBay Web Addresses

»  New Ohio Law Requires eBay Sellers to Get Licensed and Post Bond

»  Phishers Use Wildcard DNS to Build Convincing Bait URLs - Spamfo

»  eBay Drops Plans to Allow Sales of Live Pets

For additional similar stories check out our archives on Phishing, eBay

 

4 Comments »

  1. I use a free program Sam Spade 1.i4 copy and paste received from IP numbers in search block and source results are displayed. Open email and fwd after copying and pasting information then send to spoof@eBay.com also do same for paypal emails spoof@paypal.com and they investigate and take action.
    George

    Comment by George Maynard — 12/3/2007 @ 7:48 am

  2. They have been doing this for awhile. I saw through it at first blush and keep e-bay and pay pal busy investigating them.

    Comment by Frederick Lane — 12/3/2007 @ 8:26 am

  3. I’m glad I got this from you, though I don’t know why it wound up in my Spam folder. I just sent a message to eBay about one of those messages — I’m glad to see an explanation. I have an eBay account but not connected to the address where I got the phishing message.

    Comment by Misterdoe — 12/19/2007 @ 8:47 am

  4. I’ve been getting these kinds of emails regularly (possibly daily) for two months now. I think it really diminishes the eBay brand (not that I’m gung ho over eBay anymore, anyway). The first time I got a spam email like that, I had to look twice and make sure. I just usually right click on the email (Outlook) and view “options.” When I see a bunch of nonsense urls, I know what’s happening. Of course now, the emails are so regular, I just delete them as spam.

    Comment by Andrew Jensen — 2/11/2008 @ 4:57 am

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Leave a comment

Warning! All comments which contain URLs and are clearly just spam to generate a link back to the URL will be deleted on sight. Don't bother wasting your time!

If you are going to include a URL in your comment,
please keep it under 25 characters in length,
or use TinyURL to shorten it before including it in your comment.

Line and paragraph breaks are automatic, your email address is never displayed.
HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

(required)

(required)


We apologize for having to ask you to enter the letters and numbers you see in the image above to validate your comment, but we are being attacked by thousands of comment form spams every day!

 
The Internet Patrol
Patrolling the Internet for You!