eBay Announces Its New “Safeguarding Member IDs” Project

eBay gave a vital recognition to scammers at the end of October when recently it declared its unique "Safeguarding Member IDs" project. eBay will start concealing the User identification of listed buyers with relatively high offers of $200 or more on its U.S. Motors website. Vendors can see all buyers' User IDs, but it's impossible for other members to do so.

The step decreases the simplicity of bidding action for customers on the auto website to combat scammers who use mock phishing methods. Next year, eBay may bring the transformation plans for eBay.com also.

eBay's declaration demonstrates the rising success of the scammers- like, dispatching counterfeit Second Chance Offer (SCO) netmails to innocuous eBay bidders to entice them away from the eBay site unknowingly. SCOs are more deceitful than other phishing messages, as they are conveyed to persons who have really bid on the article in the counterfeit SCO bargain.

eBay Global Trust & Safety's Senior Vice President, Rob Chesnut asserted in his proclamation that the modification is an effort to combat the "villains " who aim to manipulate members of eBay. "The User identification of members - along with their member data like response and former bidding and/or purchasing behavior - has at all the times been easily accessible to anybody visiting the website."

"Regrettably though, bid record and contact details about co-workers are useful while appraising a deal, and offers some faith between deals - criminals can utilize this data dangerously," counting dispatching unwelcome profitable spam, mock emails, and counterfeit Second Chance Offer (SCO) messages. He proceeded, "...it's time to adopt tougher actions to ascertain that our members can keep on feeling secure while trading on eBay."

The "Safeguarding Member IDs" program operates by substituting member IDs with false names - like Bidder 3, Bidder 2 and Bidder 1 - on the bid record page for every listing in their bidding sequence.

Application of social engineering provides phishers an amazing benefit and the situation appears to be deteriorating annually. Toolbars and discussion groups can prevent users from being duped by phishing strikes, but can't remove the trouble completely. And it seems that ebay's move of decreasing transparency would not check it either.

Related article: EV SSL Certificate Becomes Ineffective on PayPal Having XSS Bug

» SPAMfighter News - 11/9/2006