[OM] Ebay scam I walked into

[James Royall]

I thought I was pretty aware of this kind of thing...

I got a question from a 'potential buyer' on an auction saying  
something along the lines of 'isn't the same item for sale here' and  
giving a link. Being curious and somewhat proprietorial (the traits  
the scammer works on) I thought I'd take a look. I had to log in to  
see the 'private sale'. The link failed to load anything.

I then pondered 'private sale' - as I clicked through I'd lumped the  
idea together with hiding bidders' IDs that had been discussed here  
quite recently and just thought it a new ebay idea -  but a little  
alarm bell was going off in my head. I checked the url the supposed  
duplicate item was listed at and saw it started with an IP address.  
So I had just given someone my ebay username and password.

It was less than a minute before I went in to the real ebay site and  
changed my password so I think I was quick enough to avoid trouble. I  
hadn't been on the alert as the message wasn't sent as email but  
through the ebay message system and hadn't come across scammers using  
that route before.

The name on the ebay user id...   coysnake2002

And that wasn't enough to put me on the alert??!!

James

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