I know that some of you buy and sell brugs on e-bay, and I do too. I just want to remind you to please be careful with your e-bay account -- change your password frequently, don't answer e-mails from ebay. If you should get an e-mail from e-bay, instead of clicking on any links that may be provided, go directly to e-bay and check your messages to make positively sure that the e-mail came from e-bay and not someone phishing.
It's the holiday season, and that sparks more fraud on e-bay -- I know, because it just happened to me in the tune of $580.90. It is very hard to resolve issues and get your money refunded once a third party has accessed your e-bay and paypal accounts. Really!!
I don't want to sound like I'm lecturing, I just want to remind people that there are horrible people out there that will try to scam you.
Be safe, and have a great holiday season!!
Off topic Please be careful with your e-bay account!!
How awful! Were you able to get your money back?
Whenever I get a phish email from "eBay", I copy and paste it into another email to send to their "spoof" department. Don't just forward it to them, as it will alert the phisher that your email is active.
Yes: always go to eBay from your own bookmarks or through the address bar. Same with PayPal.
Sorry to hear you got scammed! And thanks for the important reminder.
Ebay or PayPal will address you by name in emails.. Not "ebay Member" or something like that. NEVER respond to an email..
Felicia, it's so sad for that to happen to you! I hope you get it all resolved soon. We're all cheerin for ya!
Felicia, I'm sorry this happened to you and hope this gets resolved although it usually doesn't.
Nedweenie, thanks for the 'copy and paste' idea. Never though about alerting the phisher.
Thanks! Right now it's just frustrating waiting for PayPal to go through their process and put funds back into my account.
It is very scary what people can do with technology these days. And, even if you are "careful," there will still be people that can access things they should not be able to access.
This is good that you posted this Indiana Lily, It's so hard to tell these days what's fake and what's not. I don't even answer emails that I get from customers unless I go to my ebay account and click on my messages. I have received several messages that didn't originate on ebay, and they looked legit, even asking questions about my auctions, asking to reply. All I had to do is hit the reply key and they have all my ebay user information . It's scary, Best to be safe than sorry.
Thanks, Kathy_ann.
I didn't go into detail about what happened. Maybe I should have, maybe I still should. But, the bottom line though, is that if your e-bay account is hijacked by someone, you probably will not know about it -- I did not receive any kind of notification. The only time e-bay notified me was when phishing e-mails originated from my account the day after funds were stolen from me. E-bay was very quick to notify the seller of the auction that my account was hijacked, though, but not one word to me.
If someone "hijacks" your PayPal account, you won't know about it at all. You will not receive a confirmation of payment from your PayPal account, that'll be sent to the hijacker. How scary is that?
That's why it is so important to be diligent about checking your bank account balances, or your charge card balances and PayPal balances.
I've learned a lot of things from this experience -- the way both e-bay and PayPal operate because I was lucky enough to actually talk to only two people willing to work with me after I spent hours and hours on the phone with PayPal, and with e-bay's "live chat." Just be careful. There was one person on another site that stated she keeps very limited funds in her PayPal account, and has a checking account set up specifically for PayPal with very limited funds -- just in case. And, to me, that is a very, very wise thing to do.
That is a FANTASTIC idea Felicia! Thank you for posting that! I hope all this is over soon for you..
I've never had my paypal account hijacked, but I have had my ebay account hijacked. I reported it, and found out about it immediately becuase the idiot tried to list a 6,000 car through my ebay name.
I thought that was pretty stupid LOL. Got the email notification right away that I had listed something and I knew something was up. They hijacked my account because I replied to an email that looked like a legit customer email asking about a brugmansia I was selling. Never again. They look so real.
ALWAYS go to your ebay page and answer your ebay questions through your messages. ifit's not there then it didn't originate from ebay.
I am sadly neglectful of not checking my charge card records, which gets used on the net all the time. I have insurance and any charge i'm not sure about , they'll investigate. Which is great.
But I should keep on top of it all the time, I have a detailed page I print off all the time, with my internet passwords, cause every one is different. and they get changed about once ever other month or so. And everybody around here gets notified of where the new passwords are kept so that they'll know they've been changed.
My husband asked me once why don't you use the same kinds of passwords, easy ones, I just laughed at him. I have 2 pages of passwords for internet web pages, and such, it's hard to keep up with them, but I don't have any troubles with changing the passwords frequently.