Ebay / Paypal Users Report Identity Theft

Ebay / Paypal Users Report Identity Theft

IF YOU WERE BROUGHT HERE by a link in the your E-MAIL message, PLEASE READ CAREFULLY THE MESSAGE BELOW.



Dear visitors,

we regret to inform you that some sites in our domain have been recently compromised due to a hacker activity. As a result many of the Ebay/ Paypal users are being forwarded to fake pages which were located in our domain.

This message aims to stop this fraudulent activity and explain the situation.



We are very sorry for the troubles this may cause.



strelna.ru administration



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IMPORTANT EBAY SECURITY MESSAGE:



eBay has received reports of fraudulent spam emails targeting users such as yourself whose user ID is an email address. These unauthorized emails claim to come from eBay and may contain a link to a page that looks similar to a real eBay page.



The emails may claim for example that " eBay has lost your information," or "needs to verify your account (or identity)" in an effort to induce users to give out their eBay password, credit card or other personal details.



eBay will never ask for your password or credit card in an email. Never give out personal information by clicking on a link in an email. Instead, go directly to www.eBay.com to update account information to ensure that your information is being securely processed by eBay.



If you suspect that you have received such an email, or believe you have given your account information to an unauthorized site, please report it to eBay by forwarding the entire email to spoof@ebay.com.



2. The Websites: The websites created linked from these emails, look and feel almost identical to an official ebay.com or paypal.com website. These web pages are identical in almost every way from linking into real ebay/ paypal web pages, to the title of the page, to even the meta tags containing exact copies of the current keywords and descriptions used by ebay.com and paypal.com for marketing of their websites.



Clue #1: The URL: As previously stated by far the biggest clue that these websites are NOT official ebay.com or paypal.com web pages, is the URL. Ebay has already stated in the above warning that they would never ask you for your account information. On the other hand, paypal.com web pages will always contain a beginning website address of https://www.paypal.com for any type of account activities.



We have received emails on many people being scammed by variations of the www.ebay.com and www.paypal.com URL's. The scammers have more recently been purchasing every variation of the ebay and paypal domains including:



— www.paypal-anything.com (www.paypal-secure.com, www.paypal-verify.com, www.paypal-securty.com, etc)

— www.ebay-anything.com (www.ebay-secure.com, www.ebay-verify.com, www.ebay-securty.com, etc.)



Be aware that anyone could easily go out and purchase a domain like www.ebay-4me.com, but that does NOT mean it is an official ebay or paypal website.



Clue #2: Requesting Password: Ebay.com and paypal.com stated openly within their terms of service that they will never ask you for your login information or password.



Clue #3: Secure Login?: You will notice on the top of the demo page it states "Secure Login" with a lock graphic next to it. But if you take a closer look at the bottom of the page when you open it, you will not see the lock symbol in the status bar of your browser. If you do not see an https:// at the beginning of a website address, or do not see a lock symbol at the bottom of the status bar on your web browser like this then you know the web page you are viewing is not secure.



How To Protect Yourself:



If you think you have received an email from ebay.com or paypal.com like one of the ones above, or feel you may have already been scammed, you should do the following immediately:



1. Ebay.com: forward a copy of the email you received AS IS (without copy and pasting if possible and with all headers intact) to spoof@ebay.com. Save the original email in case you need it later for ebay.com, or possibly to file a police report.



2. Paypal.com: you can contact Paypal.com by means of their "Reporting Abuse" form here, or you can call them direct at: 402.935.2050



3. NetSol.com Whois: A more proactive approach to getting these sites down as quickly as possible for the experienced internet user, is to do a WhoIs lookup on the fake domain. A WhoIs record is a public record of who owns a specific domain. Click here and enter the fake domain. It will ask you to enter the password you see on screen. Once you do so take immediate note on the following items within this domain record:



a. Technical Contact: Usually by default if a person does not enter a technical contact, the company who they purchased the domain from is listed here. It will usually list an email address and sometimes a phone number. As long as the technical contact information is different from the administrative contact or " domain owner", then it is usually safe to contact them to report this violation.



b. Nameservers: Usually at the bottom of a whois record is a list of nameservers like ns.yahoo.com. This is your clue to who is hosting their website. if they do not have a technical contact differing from their administrative contact, then locate this information. By taking a nameserver like ns.yahoo.com, go to a new browser window and type in the address instead as www.yahoo.com. From the front page of the website try and locate a customer support phone number, email address, or feedback form to report this situation. Better safe than sorry.



If you suddenly realize after reading this article, that there may be a chance you were a victim of this scam, contact your local police department immediately to inform them of the situation.



All It Takes Is 5 Minutes:



While many of the hosting providers, along with ebay.com and paypal.com security, have been doing their best to shut down these sites as quickly as possible, most of these sites end up staying up for anywhere from 5 minutes to 5 hours on average. In just 5 minutes, one of these websites can claim over 1000+ victims before they are shut down.



The harsh reality is that anyone with some basic HTML knowledge can easily copy an existing paypal.com or ebay.com website, purchase a $10 domain and setup a $10 hosting account, and be in business within 24 hours. Even if you do recognize that someone has sent you a scam email, please use one or more of the methods above to contact someone to report these violations immediately. It is only with your help that we can stop scams like this from occurring.

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Please refer to the original Ebay/ Paypal site for further details.