this is freaking me out. this is the second time I have gotten one of these, from 2 different sellers. the worst part is it's a mass email:
eBay sent this message to gerald baker (shrink702).
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Question from coinfinders
Activity with coinfinders (last 90 days):
- I have bid on 3 items from coinfinderscoinfinders( 2529)
Positive Feedback: 100%
Member Since: Dec-18-97
Location: NM, United States
Registered On: www.ebay.com
Hello ,
I was informed by my bank that you have received the payment . Please contact me asap and send me the shipping details or i will contact eBay , or if you want you can send me my money back.Thank you
Nick
maybe an ebay glitch, as I have NEVER done buissness with this person.
here is the first one:
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Question from apexents
Activity with apexents (last 90 days):
- I have bid on 1 items from apexentsapexents ( 8705)
Positive Feedback: 100%
Member Since: Dec-10-03
Location: Birimingham, United Kingdom
Registered On: www.ebay.co.uk
Hi,
I contact you for your item that was on eBay I will buy it for sure but i need a quick reply about payment and shipping.I can't find the listing anymore.
Dani.
again, never done bussness with them, and there are 2 dozen emails this was sent too. I've deleted them, but just a heads up for every one else.
be careful -digital 
Phish, phish, phish.
If an alleged transaction doesn't show up under your My Ebay page, it doesn't exist.
There's several variations of the first email. One I received was very well put together, and the sender must have an ebay account, or bought a list of user names matched to email addresses. They included a link to an actual auction that had ended a month earlier, saying I was the seller (I wasn't) and they were persuing legal actions if I didn't contact them.
They try to get you two ways:
1) Using the link to ebay in their email sends to a fake page in an attempt to harvest your ebay account.
2) You respond, even to tell them to sod off, and they start spamming you and re-selling your email as an 'active' address.
Forwarding the fake email to ebay does little good, as they get too many to follow up, plus I don't think they particilarly care.
Always, ALWAYS check the full headers and full message source to see where the mail came from. I've gotten some very nice looking nearly passable as offical emails, but they couldn't fake either 1) the sender 2) the phishing/harvesting link. Some go so far as to just prepend thier own domain to an actual eBay link. Then they just make a directory on their web server called cgi-bin.ebay.com or somesuch and point the link there, thinking they wil fool people because the link has ebay.com in it...
The first thing I do when something real seems to have shown up from eBay or PayPal is to open a new window and go straight to ebay.com or paypal.com and check for matching info in my member pages.
Of course 99.9% of 'em get the spam button almost right off. When will they learn that embedding a graphic screen cap of an eBay email just doesn't fool me when it's in a different font, different font size and different screen resolution? I swear those dorks must be using a 640x480 screen to do a screen cap...
that my friend is a spoof attempt to try to get you to provide your login info to take over your account. if you try to respond to them useing the link in the email and you sign in they have your account info to use it to there will. this exsact thing happened to me a few week's ago.
And like a dummy i clicked a link in the email wich takes you to a spoofed ebay site to make you use your username and password so they can use the info to gain accses to your account on the real ebay and do what they want to do AKA steal your creadet card info or other stuff.
here is a easy way to tell if its spoof email or not. Any thing having to do with your ebay account as in messages are conserned will show up in your ebay accoun inbox and will get sent to your email. but if nothing is in your ebay account inbox and you get a email from ebay then its a spoof.
if you did log in useing any link in those email's thay have your info to your account and ebay will suspend your account mabe if they catch it. they suspended my acount till i had reactivated useing the help chat thing on ebay to explain to them what happened. they reenabled it but you wont be able to log in with the password you use to use you have to change it and update your info.
then go to pay-pal and update your info there cause you changed your password and stuff on ebay. and then change your email password just incase they some how gained accses to that.
this stuff does suck, but does happen so we all need to be on the look out for this stuff. just send all the email's to spoof@ebay.com i think it is just forward the email's to them
From a current ebay user that was a victim of a spoof ebay email.
Frank McHugh
that's the freaky thing, there is NO link to ebay anywhere in there. I triple checked.
I am also not stupid enough to give out my info. they have been deleted.
the odd thing is all my ebay buissness is done in my yahoo mail account. So where exacly did they get my gmail account info?
I am not going to reply, so hopefully they will think I have a dead account.
I have gotten in the past (about 5 times), one of those fake ones with a link to a spoof ebay page. I forewarded them onto ebay, they said they will take care of it, so we will see.
-digital
Are you that username@gmail.com as well as shrink702 as an ebay seller, or maybe your yahoo account is shrink702@yahoo.com? If any of these are used with your real name, it's possible your name got sold. Otherwise call the feds.
I've actually been getting alot of similiar spam without any sort of phishing link. Does it have any weird html in it? They could be real ebay accounts and hoping that someone who gets the email would have done lots of business and not check if they had infact done business with the person.
no, I am not any of those. my username is not related in any way to any other account I have. about the only thing is I use "iamdigitalman" for all message boards, but everything else is diffe3rent.
-digital
Its very simple. If in doubt forware the email to spoof@ebay.com
Ebay will reply telling you if the offending email came from them OR not.
99% time it will say it did NOT come from them and they will investigate it.
For approx. 3 years now I have been getting a slew of phishing attempts from spam fake Ebay emails.
So forward away and check your "my ebay"
MaxTek
They could also just be email validators. If it has HTML in the email and wants to load an image, they can use the reffering URL or something in the request URL to verify that they got a "live" email address if a particular image on their server is requested. Then they add it to a list to be sold. Sneakier than phishing, as all you have to do is read the email with an HTML capable mail reader, and then they know you have an active account.
eBay's been acting a little strange lately for me. My listing confirmations are taking a long time to reach me, and one of my auctions closed two days ago and I still haven't gotten the usual eBay notice about it. The only way I knew someone closed it with buy-it-now was because I just happened to check the auction.
I always suspected that the spammers harvest all eBay user names then simply append @gmail.com, @hotmail.com, @yahoo.com, @aol.com, @sbcglobal.net, @comcast.net, etc. to each and every user name harvested and then they go "phishing" with a massive e-mail blast. It's a good strategy. When eBay eliminated e-mail addresses as screen names, many members simply deleted the @domainname.com so your chance of recovering an e-mail address from a user name is probably pretty good.
The "phishers" are looking for valid e-mail addresses and they're looking for the one gullible person who actually enters their login and password, or worst, they're banking information.
I imagine it's not the only way spammers get your e-mail address, but it is one way to do it.
tony b.
THe Exact thing happend to me. SOMeone sent me a paypal phishing one, to an e-mail i didnt even have a Paypal Accoutn for so,
i know my ebay user name and email address has nothing in common
OH and hi WTHWW
Yea that happend to me too but i didn't have a paypal account so i was like err ok this is fun
well, I forewarded one of them on to ebay, and they sent this back, same message they always give. BS:
-digital