Learning To See the Scams

I hate to belabor the point about internet scammers, but my sweet and kind mother is 78 and I am always watching out for her because it is the kind and trusting people like her who are the targets of these Charlie-Manson-like, conscienceless, bottom-dwelling, gutter slime internet scammers.

I got a VERY legitimate-looking e-mail from “eBay” recently. It looks like a standard eBay notification where if a potential buyer has a question they can write to you through eBay to ask a question. Here is a snapshot of my e-mail program showing the legit looking question about the painting I had up for auction: [Picture] The e-mail has a standard “Respond Now” button in it, but underlying the code, invisibly, is an address that takes me to a different server than eBay’s. Here’s a picture of my browser showing the fake eBay site: [Picture]

This would
probably fool
most peopleUnfortunately, I think most people would be fooled by the page and URL/Address once they open it in their browser, so I am posting this so that others know—for safety’s sake—to NEVER respond to an e-mail that comes from eBay. Even if you have every reason to believe it came from eBay, use eBay’s own safety feature:

Open your Internet browser and type in “www.ebay.com” yourself. You will be taken to the only legitimate eBay website, and when you then log in, you can be certain you are passing on your secret info only to eBay computers. Once you legitimately log in, you can click on “My eBay” and check for any messages.

All messages that are truly sent from eBay to you (including questions from buyers/sellers) will be available to read and respond to within the My eBay section of eBay’s service. They do this to help you avoid becoming the victim of rampant fraud.

Never respond to anything eBay sends to your mailbox. It’s safest to only do it from your browser while logged into eBay.

If you look at the second picture I link to, you’ll see that the initial part of the URL/address (a numeric IP address) is not ebay.com [Picture], even though the next part of the URL says “signin.ebay.com.”