Online Identity Theft
bogus email and web site
sent out on 4th September 2003

This bogus eBay email was distributed on 4th September 2003 and we also have images of the spoof web pages that it would have sent you to. These are just images of the originals, so there is absolutely no code included and none of the links or buttons will now work. The images have been reduced to 80% of the actual size.

The bogus email states that eBay are performing regular maintenance of their security measures - see an image of the email here. There is a form in the email, that requests your eBay user ID and password, and email address and password.

If you fill in and submit the form in that email, you would arrive at a sign in page that looks exactly as you would expect to see on eBay (see the image of this page here) while the information you've put into the email form is forwarded to the scammers. This page is a spoof which has been constructed using code from eBay's own servers. It is clearly apparent that the page is spoofed when you see the URL/web address in your browser's address bar - 'http://www.electronick-checker.com.....' has absolutely nothing to do with eBay whatsoever, and is in fact registered to an apparent individual in Birmingham, Alabama, USA. And the domain is being hosted on servers registered to Technorail, Arezzo, Italy (part of Aruba).

If you have fallen for this spoof, please follow our guidelines on what to do now.

Be vary wary of emails, and read our advice on how to recognise spoofs, email content and links in Part 3 of our article.

First the spoof email which contains the form...

The Email ...

If you complete and submit the form in that email, you will then arrive at the spoof eBay page, but notice the URL shown in the browser address bar - this is not what you would expect to see with a genuine eBay page...

 

The fake web page...

On completing and submiting this form, you would be sent to the genuine eBay.com site.