"No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine." - - - William Blum

January 14, 2005

Beware: Safeharbor is out to steal your identity


I received this email today:

Dear valued customer

We regret to inform you that your eBay account could be suspended if you don't re-update your account information. To resolve this problems please click here and re-enter your account information. If your problems could not be resolved your account will be suspended for a period of 24 hours, after this period your account will be terminated.

For the User Agreement, Section 9, we may immediately issue a warning, temporarily suspend, indefinitely suspend or terminate your membership and refuse to provide our services to you if we believe that your actions may cause financial loss or legal liability for you, our users or us. We may also take these actions if we are unable to verify or authenticate any information you provide to us.

Due to the suspension of this account, please be advised you are prohibited from using eBay in any way. This includes the registering of a new account. Please note that this suspension does not relieve you of your agreed-upon obligation to pay any fees you may owe to eBay.

Regards, Safeharbor Department eBay, Inc
The eBay team.
This is an automatic message. Please do not reply.

This is a blatant scam letter designed to draw some trusting soul to a site that will ask them to "update" their personal identity info. The message is written well enough to probably fool a lot of people, so beware if you get it. The message asks you to go to THIS page, which immediately asks for some very personal and secure information (eBay login and password, SSN, mother's maiden name, address, phone, credit card info, bank account info, etc., pretty much the whole gamut). The links at the bottom of the message are actually legit eBay pages, which adds to the deception. The first immediate tipoff to me that it was a scam letter was that it was sent to an email account of mine that I do NOT have listed on eBay, so my warning flag went up in about 5 milliseconds. Be careful out there...

I went ahead and put in completely fake info on the scam page. That should use at least some of their resources (time/effort) before they catch on. If you want me to forward their email to you so that you can take a look and maybe scam them back, send your email address to me.

No comments: