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e-bay trickster

Sub-forums for Daimler, Lanchester & BSA for sale
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John Chatfield
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Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2016 11:00 pm
Location: Shrewsbury England

e-bay trickster

Post by John Chatfield »

Just a quick heads-up there is a 'person' who is quite obviously scamming on e-bay, he has or may have hijacked a sellers id of martinh4409 and is giving a location of Cradley Heath, all his listings were set up to end at 9.30 and there are hundreds of the across cars and bikes of all makes and models and stating they are for sale on behalf of someone who is out of the country at present. I have noticed some folk have put bids on them I just hope they haven't put any money down.

Brian-H
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Re: e-bay trickster

Post by Brian-H »

Such as this Daimler v8 250

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Daimler-v8-250/203262890685

2 bids already

They keep on hijacking ebay accounts, they get the password to the account by sending a supposed ebay email to the seller with a link to log into ebay, which is not an ebay link, but it then forwards the seller to the real ebay and logs them in, meanwhile having kept the login details. Usually the seller has no knowledge of having been hijacked. There is always 2 pics on each item for sale, the 2nd pic gives the contact details and those details are used to get someone to pay cash via money transfer. Note that bidding in the conventional way will not lose anybody any money as the item does not exist and the account hijackers have no access to the sellers Paypal account - they rely on scamming some cash by money transfer

The link above will continue to work until ebay become aware that the account has been hijacked.

Note that if you set up 2-step verification on your ebay account, it cannot be hijacked.

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DR450USA
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Re: e-bay trickster

Post by DR450USA »

good news. The link you posted is dead.

Petelang
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Re: e-bay trickster

Post by Petelang »

Yeah but, he'll be back again tomorrow....
Peter Langridge
Cloud Nine Classic Weddings, Nottingham.

Petelang
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Re: e-bay trickster

Post by Petelang »

With so many scams, so many elder people being defrauded, this sort of crime is far more rife than burglary or theft ever was and yet so very infinitesimally little it seems is being done to counteract it. Surely the hi tech people have a way to act on this by now? Its draining the economy of literally billions and the only recourse seems to try to get the banks to compensate.
How many of us have ever heard of even one of these fraudsters being jailed? Surely its well past time that the governments around the world invoked some very serious action against it?
I'm no boffin but, as every computer has an IP address, surely they CAN be traced?
After all, they seem to be able to determine where Russia has "interfered" in elections and can hack into all kinds of systems.
Whats everyone else thinking?
If you were to drop into your local bank and steal a few grand, you would almost inevitably be caught and serve a few years. No wonder the likes of smart Nigerians are adopting this type of crime, sitting in the sunshine nicking thousands from pensioners from the comfort of their air conditioned homes.
Its time it was stopped.
Peter Langridge
Cloud Nine Classic Weddings, Nottingham.

Brian-H
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Re: e-bay trickster

Post by Brian-H »

The main problem is the people who respond to the scams.

If you get an email from a business with a link and their "representative" asking you to login to "verify your account" , why click on the link ? Firstly, if you use a PC you can hover the mouse over the link and the full link address can be seen. Secondly, keep the business bookmarked, and use that bookmark to login to check. The issue may be related to those who use smart phones most of the time, where in my experience you can't do either of those things as rapidly as you can with a PC. So it comes down to being internet savvy, especially when it comes to emails, as emails are the open letterbox through which crims can get in.

Regarding this particular ebay account hijacker, I just wonder whether anyone really has been caught out. About 18 months ago I did contact them on the email address that was in the pic on one of their hijacked accounts. The reply I got was that the car was in Italy (Valencia I think) and the exchange went something along the lines of me having to pay some money upfront (unspecified amount) to them, for them to trailer it back to the UK for me to view it, and then pay cash if I wanted to buy it. I dodged that and said I'd get a relative who lived in the region to go view it there (not true), and got no further replies.

Regarding IP addresses to locate where the scammer is, well ebay would have to devote some resources to do this but even if they did, if the scammer is in Nigeria there's nothing that ebay can do about it. I went to Nigeria on a couple of projects in the late 80s, Lagos was a dodgy looking place even then, but up in the North it was a lot more friendly - just like the UK really. I'd think that, like many other countries in the world, it's become more dangerous now.

But nearly all the scams originate in Boiler rooms whether in Nigeria or any other dodgy country. The police in those countries find it very difficult to catch them at work because of corruption, so that if they do organise a raid, by the time they get there, they find the place empty. The term "Boiler room" does mean a hastily arranged office space, usually active for a week to a month, and then they relocate to another. So IP address doesn't really help, because by the time they've been tracked down, they've moved on to a new building with a new IP address.

This is not a new problem, it's been going on for decades, before the internet. The internet just makes it a bit quicker and simpler for the Boiler room to diversify into other scams.

Sydsmith
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Re: e-bay trickster

Post by Sydsmith »

As I see it there are two people for every deal, some get caught out of sheer innocence, most get caught out of greed, they see a bargain and they get scammed, if it looks to good to be true it is too good to be true.

The likes of fleabay compound the problem. Surely it cannot be outside their technical resources to keep their platform safe. It must have stuck out a mile when these people listed so many items on a seller that never sold such things, in this case they listed over 50 vehicles some of them over £50,000 on a seller who only bought small items before.

They were very quick to caution me when someone tried to send me his phone number to arrange a meet, they spotted it and I got an email within a hour for breaking the rules.

Brian-H
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Re: e-bay trickster

Post by Brian-H »

It's very easy to search for strings of numbers in messages.
The standard uk format 07123 456 789 is 11 digits long
The international uk format +447123 456 789 is 12 digits long
Those are very easily found

But I've even been informed that putting e.g. zero seven one two three four five six seven eight nine can be found, even if only by looking for "seven" followed by a few other numbers in words.

The other search would be for "phone" or "phone number". The only way to send it would be to omit the leading zero and leading +44 and then stick the numbers randomly into a long text, and hope that the person receiving the message understood.

Regarding someone adding new items for sale, well that would also be relatively easy to spot, but there must be many instances of sellers adding large amounts of items for sale. What you're basically thinking of is some form of AI rther than a standard pattern search.

As an example of a simple pattern search, press Ctrl F, then enter 30, and you'll see quite a few instances of 30 on this page (currently nine). That's how easy it is, AI is not easy to implement at all.

h.j.thomassen
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Re: e-bay trickster

Post by h.j.thomassen »

On my DS420 website I have a 'How to buy' entry, and I now have added a gallery of screen shots of scam pages, that obviously all come from the same scammer.
The collection gives a nice overview of the "modus operandi" of this person:
http://www.myDS420.info/howtobuy/gallerysub_ebay/
It clearly shows that warnings based on the seller's name are fruitless.

enjoy,
Hendrik-Jan

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