Romanian Hacker Posts User Information on EBay Forum

On March 8, 2007 early morning EST, a hacker who claimed to be known by "Born_To_Scam_American_Guys" posted personal information of 15 eBay members publicly on an eBay forum. The posting stayed there for 40-60 minutes before eBay erased it, said the company.

The Romanian hacker allegedly signed his entry into the eBay discussion forum through a hijacked account and started writing conversations on the Trust and Safety Board of eBay. His initial conversation included taunts that later developed into a broadcasting of protected financial information of 15 eBay users. The information comprised of bank account and routing numbers, ATM PIN numbers, credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, mother's maiden names, home addresses and contact details.

Firemeg.com, a site that dedicates to eBay watching informed that the broadcast appeared on the forum at 1:52 EST. According to Firemeg.com the initial post, in rather crude English said that the writer saw scope for lot of things such as scams, although it was quite a stupid thing. He thought the Romanians were the best guys because they were in every country, every city and every day made lots of money out of people's pockets to stuff them in their bank accounts. And this was possible because people were stupid and the Romanian boys could easily scam them with the help of phishing sites.

The post further said that nothing was impossible for these boys. They knew how to abuse PayPal bank accounts, wire transfer, credit cards and spam. The writer then says that while American and Canadian boys of 14-15 years old only knew how to eat burgers and watch nude girls on Internet porno sites, the Romanian guys of 14-15 years old knew how to scam people. They learnt to build a website and knew how to hijack an Internet server.

Soon after eBay removed the above posting, Born_To_Scam_American_Guys put up another post namely "Smart Americans".

An eBay spokeswoman Catherine England said that only 50% of the accounts were legitimate while the remaining appeared as fraudulent.

EBay customers showed fury at eBay for not intimating those whose accounts were fraudulently seized.

Related article: Romanian Hacker Haunting ebay

» SPAMfighter News - 3/26/2007