Ebay Identity Theft - Ebay Phishing Emails!

I was a technology consultant for several years and I am the builder and administrator of my own office network, websites, etc. . .  I tell you this so you know that I know what I am talking about here.   Though in the scope of things these aren't major accomplishments, the skills I gained about computers and the internet for more than a decade have saved me what could have been large and aggravating financial losses and identity theft issues.

If you haven't received one of the hundreds of emails that are circulating the internet that try to obtain your ebay.com logon information in order to steal your identity and/or hack into your account, it's probably just a matter of time.

This is just a barebones guide to try to help you identify fraudulent Ebay Second Chance Offer Emails, Dispute Resolution emails, Ebay "Account Limited" emails, Ebay Account Suspended emails and others.

Many of us receive HTML or what you might call web page style emails or multimedia emails. 

These emails can look and act just like web pages and can appear to be an authentic eBay email unless you are VERY, VERY CAREFUL.

So I'll share with you the only foolproof manner I know of so that you aren't tricked into disclosing your eBay Account information.

Here is the simplified process.

1.  You receive an email that looks like it came from eBay.
2.  In your email program simply left mouse click on the title of that email once to select it.
3.  Go to the File menu of your email program and select "Save As". 
4.  If you don't see File>Save As in your email program, then try looking for the word "Export" or "Export As"
4.  Select the option to save or export as "HTML".
5.  Save the HTML file to your desktop for easy access.
6.  Now, go to your desktop and right mouse click on the HTML file that you created.
7.  From the pop-up menu select "Open With" and then browse for a text editor program to open it.
8.  On Windows Computers I recommend using Notepad or WordPad.
9.  On Mac OS Computers I recommend using TextWrangler which is a freeware program readily found on the web.
10.  Open the file.  You will see the coding and references used to create the email.

Go through the email carefully looking for links.

Now, when you find a link what should you look for?

The link must begin with some variation of the following:

1.  https://www.ebay.com
2.  https://anyword.ebay.com
3.  http://www.ebay.com  (notice I just removed the "s" as the 5th character from example #1 above)
3.  http://anyword.ebay.com (notice I just removed the "s" as the 5th character from example #2 above)


The word "anyword" here could be any word that eBay.com has chosen to use such as "pages.ebay.com",
"sellers.ebay.com", etc. . .  It is sufficient for this brief guide for you to know that the word pages in
pages.ebay.com is called a subdomain or canonical domain.

If ALL the links do not begin with one of the patterns noted above then it is highly advisable not to click on anything in the email and rely on it as reliable because it's probably someone trying to steal your identity.