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:
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:
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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). < 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
< a href="http://www.unl.edu.ec/feue/mambots/ editors/z/" target=_blank rel=nofollow > Review payment details < /a> Thank you, eBay |
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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.
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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.
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.
They have been doing this for awhile. I saw through it at first blush and keep e-bay and pay pal busy investigating them.
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