Question about your Item

Man, am I seeing a huge influx of eBay phishing email lately. It’s pretty unconvincing, since it always goes to addresses at which I have no eBay account, is about items that closed in January and besides I’ve never listed an item on eBay. I believe we have hit the point were email is ineffective from eBay, PayPal, banks or any sort of institution that holds your money, because the odds are than any email you purportedly get from them is statistically more likely to be fake than real. Sorry guys, you should have addressed this five years ago when it first became a problem. You have now ceded the email pathway to the scumbags entirely.

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Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.

2 thoughts on “Question about your Item”

  1. I get really frustrated with phishers. Mostly because I worry about my parents or our less tech savvy clients getting ripped off. I always try to forward them to the real entity that the phish claims to be.

    Bank of America has an interesting solution- you enter your username on the first page and your password on the second page. The second page contains a special “site key” which is really just an icon you pick out of a large set they provide. So you shouldn’t enter your password unless the site key matches the one you choose in your preferences.

  2. I do everything except deposit money online with my bank account (at a credit union) and only get one email from them, my link to my e-statement once a month. I loves them. (Though some phishers have a National Credit Union scam, claiming to represent ALL credit unions…)

    The scary part about phishers is that some of them are starting to call… at least in the UK. A LJ acquaintence said someone who SAID they were from Barclay’s Bank called, but when they started asking questions about his account number, etc. that they SHOULD already have on file, he had the light go on and got as much info from them without divulging any of his before they hung up on him. Then he immediately called the bank and let their customer security know about it.

    I could see someone more naive, like my 80-year-old mother, fallng for this kind of ploy.

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