Absolute Beginners Guide to eBay (4th Edition)

There's one last thing worth mentioning about your eBay account. eBay will never, ever send you emails asking you to update your account and then provide a link in the email for you to click for that purpose. While eBay will send you emails (and lots of themeither informational or promotional in nature), they don't send out the type of "instant account management" email shown in Figure 2.7.

If you receive this type of email, for either your eBay or PayPal account, you can be sure it's a scamin particular, a "phishing" scam. If you click the link in the email (which looks like a real, honest-to-goodness eBay URL), you won't be taken to eBay. Instead, that fake URL will take you another site, run by the scammer, which will be tricked up to look like the eBay site. If you enter your personal information, as requested, you're actually delivering it to the scammer, and you're now a victim of identity theft. The scammer can use the information you provided to hack into your eBay account, make unauthorized charges on your credit card, and maybe even drain your banking account.

Caution

It goes without saying that you should never respond to this type of email, no matter how official-looking it appears. If you want to make changes to your eBay or PayPal account, never do so from an email link. Instead, use your web browser to go directly to the official site, and make your changes there. No one from eBay or PayPal will ever ask you for this information via email. Be warned!

Also be warned that phishers are getting more sophisticated in the ability to spoof official-looking eBay emails. In recent months I've received spoof emails that purport to invite me to join eBay's PowerSeller program; that purport to be another user asking a question about an in-process auction (even when I wasn't running any auctions that week!), and that purport to warn me about unauthorized use of my PayPal account. When I clicked the links in these emails, I was presented with an official-looking but quite unofficial eBay log-in screen; were I to log in, the phishers would have been able to grab my eBay ID and password, and then do who knows what with my account.

Note

The profusion of all these spoof emails has inspired eBay to add a My Messages section to the My eBay page. To access this feature, click the My eBay link at the top of any eBay page, and then scroll down to the My Messages section and click the "new messages" link. This displays the My Messages screen, shown in Figure 2.8, where all your recent messages are listed. These are official communications from eBay, and from other eBay users. It's safe to read the messages listed here, because they've been confirmed authentic by eBay. Click any message subject to read the full messageand then ignore any spoof messages that end up in your email inbox!