Scientific Relationship Between eBay and Spam

[shoplineca]

Fact Number 1: I havent been listing many items on eBay for some time, in fact I have only had 1 item listed for the last couple of weeks.
I receive 1-2 spam emails per day.

Fact Number 2: Yesterday afternoon I listed 6 additional items.
I woke up to 8 spammed emails this morning, 2 telling me I have been kicked off eBay and the rest selling me printer inks and natural alternatives to viagara.

This is the identical experience I had a couple of months ago when I went from having no listings over a 2 week period and 1 daily spam received to listing 7 or 8 items and getting 6-7 daily spams including the infamous 'kicked off eBay' ones.

I therefore conclude that there is a direct relation between listing on eBay and receiving spam by persons using eBay to obtain our email addresses.

Malcolm

[muminlaw]

I was away, and therefore not listing, for 6 weeks. During that time I checked from various locations, and deleted uncounted spams. When I got home, I had accumulated, in about 1 week since the previous check, 143 spams and 5 legitimate emails.

I therefore conclude that once the spammers have your email addy, it doesn't matter whether you're listing or not! Having said that, this address is used for eBay ONLY so it does look like the spammers are harvesting addresses from eBay.
. Glenda
To Golf or Not To Golf? What a stupid question!

[auctiondropnship]

I beat you all
I have to have catseye* login too my Ebay email and delete when I go on vacation cause I get about 200 spam emails a day

[sunset_sports_cards]

I almost wonder if the E-Bay servers are in fact already "hacked" and these "hackers" are getting our information from them. Any ideas E-Bay???

[sunward-hobbies]

I don't find ebay servers have been hacked.

Just once your email address gets out there, there is no turning back. Using spamcop.net does seem to cut down on the amount of spam.

What is hacked is hotmail.com. I have email account I have never given out, yet get lots of spam.

Angelo

[audioshack]

Unfortunately, putting your email address in your listings is an open invitation to spammers.

[valuepricedsoftware]

Yes, I have my email address in my listings and it seems that they "harvest" the addresses off of eBay. I don't know if their is anything that can be done by eBay on their end other than outlaw email addresses in listings. I don't think that would be a good idea.

I get the email at least twice a day that I am being kicked off eBay or my paypal account has been limited. they know your email is attached to eBay so they try and get the info, It must be profitable or they would not try.


The user previously known as Knarfdotca.

[shoplineca]

I know that the eBay servers were hacked 2 years ago as someone was trying to hack into our server to use it for forwarding spam.

We tracked the guy back to an eBay server. We sent eBay an email together with particulars but we did not hear back from eBay.I guess they didnt want to ackowledge it for fear of it getting out to the public.

Malcolm

[sunset_sports_cards]

I think the servers at E-Bay are still hacked. I mean really, it would probably take much.

[cartoonsinabox]

Sun_Sports_cards,
If Ebays servers were hacked your credit card and mine would have been a longtime used for fraudulent purshases. I don't think there hacked. I think its hackers taking ramdom email addresses and sending us junk mail or trying to get personnal information out of us.

Frederic

[shoplineca]

They were able to access the eBay servers to forward spam but did not have access to personal information (at least that anyone was aware of).

They were quite relentless at trying to get into our servers for the same purpose however my son, the techie in this business continued to block their attempts which lasted several hours and continued for several days, on and off.

Most of these people, when sending spam, use a chain of 7-9 different servers to delay people from finding out where the spam originated from.

When people check it back, it leads them to someone's legitimate server... and then a search there leads them back to someone else's legitimate server in another country and so on and so on.

The idea is to make it difficult and costly to follow the entire chain back to the source.

The largest spammers to date came out of Ontario, a father and his 2 sons were charged last year from Kitchener (I believe) from running a spamming operation for years, sending hundreds of millions of spammed emails.

However there are hundreds of people who have been charged with spamming including several large businesses. Aside from the spamming being bothersome to individuals, it bogs down many servers because of the sheer volume and there is a sizeable cost and loss of business as a result.

Malcolm

[sunset_sports_cards]

Frederic, I wasn't talking a "take over" of the E-Bay servers. You can still hack a server and not have access to all the information on the hard drives of that server. When the "techies" make these servers up, the end user is advised not to store all information on the same disk. Some of these servers have more than 5 hard disks. The "hacker" would then have to find out where the info is stored. And when a "hacker" gets to looking for the info they want, it may be too late and they will get caught. I would wager a experienced guess and say that our credit card and personal info is still intact.