Ebay phishing scam

Last weekend, I got one of those “unpaid item reminder” emails from what looked on the surface to be the automated Ebay system. Here’s how I immediately recognised it as a phishing scam:

1. The "To" message header says "undisclosed-recipients". No personal email addressed to you would ever be sent to "undisclosed-recipients" because it’s a sure sign that it’s a bulk email addressed to a bunch of other people too.

2. The "X-Mailer" message header says "Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00". Since when would any business, especially one the size of Ebay, use Outlook Express?

3. Because my email client is configured to ignore HTML, all I could see in the body of the message was a single sentence which says "this message does not have a plain text part". I don’t know of anyone other than rank amateurs or spammers who send HTML-only mail.

These people are about as dumb as dodos. I wonder how much money they made last week?

Posted in Email, Law, Security, Tips by Ivan