New Phishing E-Mail Purports eBay

There is a warning for eBay users that new phishing e-mail is making rounds on the Internet. Appearing to be a normal confirmation note, the message informs the user that a delivery of $249.20 has been arranged to an AOL e-mail id. The legitimate looking e-mail provides a transaction number actually to dupe the victim.

Users are advised not to click on the links that the e-mail shows. The site following the link although looks real but it is designed to seize the user's personal account or bank account details. Once the cyber thief acquires the information he could use it to sweep clean all the deposits from the user's bank account. Today, the entire process can be completed in a remarkably short time.

The e-mail concludes by saying "thank you for using eBay". This is deliberate so that if the user clicks on the given "view details" link, a Web page displays on the screen where the online criminals wait to capture the user's personal account information.

The phisher's main objective from all this is to make some innocent persons visit the spurious website purporting a reputable organization. And to achieve this he will perform any trick, said Sunil Kripalani, VP, Global Sales and Marketing, MicroWorld Technologies. Smbedge published this as news on May 14, 2007.

Kripalani continues saying that despite adequate awareness being disseminated by several agencies and mainstream media providing considerable coverage to the issue, it's hoped that tricking people in this manner won't be easy. However, the actual scenario is quite different, as published by Smbedge published on May 14, 2007.

Phishing scams are still able to rob people of millions from their bank accounts every year. At the same time theft of personal information like Social Security number, date of birth etc. escapes notice of many.

A criminal can very easily fool a novice eBay user, says Storm Jackson. Once in 2002 he became a victim while signing up eBay and PayPal for the first time. He had received an e-mail, which said his PayPal account was suspended. Jackson responded to it without realizing it was a phishing e-mail.

Related article: New Zealand Releases Code To Reduce Spam

» SPAMfighter News - 5/19/2007