A little background.

I bid on and was out bid on a item several weeks back. Thus, my last bid was the second highest bid.

I have since been spammed repeatedly to my home email by fake people offering a "second chance" on a item that their buyer backed out on. Point being, eBay has given my info out and or there is a loop hole somewhere in their policies that allow this to happen.

I have reported these spammings to their anti spam group and fraud group. Since that time I have had three people (barb M., bernice and janice) sending me generic exact carbon copies of their privace policy. I guess this is an attempt to prove to me that they are not giving my info out.

Those of you who have bid on eBay know what the letters look like when someone uses the "ask this seller a question" button (basically the format of these letter), well, these are the letter that I am being spammed with, EXACTLY. Only difference is, I have never contacted these people, nor expressed any interest in the item they are supposably selling. That and the fact that instead of these letter coming in to my home email stating I have a message from ebay, these are the messages coming directly to my home email.

Late last week, I started receiving"second chance" offers from people through hotmail accounts to my home account.

I have tried repeately to convince eBay that these people are getting my info from them, but they are standing fast on the fact that their policy prohibits such activities. Again, I am having to convince/prove to them that there is an issue, rather than them just spending a few minutes of their time reviewing the spam that I have forwarded on to them as per their policy.

This is going on week three. Their spamming group states 24 hours to respond. They have held true to the 24 hour response, only problem is, each time it's a different person and each time I have to explain the issue from the beginning and their immediate response is "here is our policy", we don't allow this to happen.

OKAY!!!!...

So I have bid for years on eBay and have never had a problem. Although, I don't remember ever being out-bid at the end and ending up the second highest bidder. I'm usually too far into winning at that point and over bid.

Here nor there, I am having an issue now and thought I'd share it with everyone.. well because _____ing to them has got me no where and the spamming continues.

OH... I know there is a box in the privacy area that you can check or uncheck for second chance offers. I have always had this set as to NOT receive these offers.

So there is my whining for the day... NOW, I must shower and head up to Portland to do a little family stuff....

 

You don't have to answer directly...

but is your home account something like... @comcast.net or @hotmail.com? Something like that. And...is your ebay profile the same as those email addresses?

There are a few people at work here that have seen the same thing, and we figured out how they are doing it. It seems that a large amount of ebay users use the same prefix from their emails as their ebay id. So now, scammers can just send out emails to...

ebayid @gmail.com or @hotmail.com or @comcast.net.

Get it? Chances are, one of those main email programs are going to be the same. If not, it goes into a spam mailbox or something like that. They may only get 1 out of 100 right, but that one might actually work.

They look so real too. The only reason we figured it out was because after talking to the person, they wanted a cashier's check and told us that they were out of the country for the next couple of months, so to send it to Germany or something.

It's pretty sneaky.

That is...assuming that what I said above it true about you.

 

that blows... only thing i can think of... is they got your screen name from the list of bidders on whatever item you may have bid on at one point... then sent you messages that way...
ugly problem, and outside of getting on the phone all day with them.. no way to resolve it quickly or w/o having to re-explain it each time

 

I fully agree with bcs on this. It's a little late for this advice unless you don't mind killing your current ebay account / hotmail account BUT... I would suggest making a new ebay account with an username that you only use there as well as creating a second hotmail/gmail/yahoo whatever you want for use with that. It is a pain I know... but it saves you from a lot of spam on your main email. I have been doing this for the past year with gmail accounts and I currently get 0 spam/scam/phishing on my main email. My gmail however is almost all spam

Not to sound like a paranoid nut case but anytime you through your information on a site publically someone is bound to try a way to scam you.

Good luck on getting it all resolved -- there is nothing worse than seeing you X new messages and finding out they are all scam mails.

 

My eBay screen name/log on is something off the wall compared to my home email address. As far as my .com ending, it's not one of the free-bee emails..

I just received 6 emails from ebay customer service bascially telling me that they do not know where these people got my home email from, but they have positively identified that none of the ones I forwarded to them have ebay accounts listed to the email origin ( as if they would). Also none of the emails originated from ebay.

They also suggested I NOT buy from them....lol... Like I would

For now, I guess my only recourse would be a new email and or continue to use my providers spam block for each spam. I guess the later would be the simplest to use for now.

I do know that a phone call to eBay is in order to voice my dismay over how the generic nature of their emails are far from easing my concerns.

Thanks for your info about others having simular issues. eBay is acting like this is an isolated case... Pretty thin if you ask me.


singleshot

 

I do occasionally get something from eBay - but so does half the planet, it seems.

I have also received phony 'second chance' offers (and referred them to spoof@ebay.com).

BUT the spoof mail has consistantly come in to accounts that have NEVER been used on eBay, but have rather common user names.

It's no different from any other spam, except that it is formatted to 'seem' like it is from eBay.

Just another annoying layer of crap on an antique e-mail system.

Tomas