eBay Members Protect Yourselves and Change Your eBay Preferences

The first step that you can take to protect yourself from scammers is to go to your eBay account in My eBay and change your eBay Preferences. Change the Notification Delivery of all messages from HTML to Text-Only format. This way, when you receive messages from eBay to your registered email address you will know immediately if you are receiving a fake invoice, phish or a spoof message, because if those messages arrive in HTML format, you will know immediately that they are phony.

Second, change your Buying Notifications to NOT subscribe to Second Chance Offers. If you refuse to receive Second Chance Offers then you should NOT receive them. After changing your Preferences, if Second Chance Offers do arrive addressed to your registered email address you will know that they are phony.

Third, whenever you receive an email from eBay, double-check and make sure that it is in your My Messages in box in My eBay. If the message you receive to your registered email address is NOT in My Messages, then the message you received is phony.

Fourth, while you're making changes to your eBay account go to your PayPal account and change your Preferences to ONLY receive messages in Text-Only format. Then afterwards if you receive email messages from PayPal and they are in HTML format, you will know immediately that they are phony.

Change your Preferences and take these simple precautions and you will be taking a step in the right direction to protect yourself from scammers.

If you emailed an eBay scammer ...

WARNING!
By contacting your 'seller' outside of eBay, you are in danger of being defrauded. The item/s you are interested in do not exist!

Scammers are hijacking eBay IDs all the time and listing thousands of non-existent items every day.

The scammers want you to contact them outside of eBay via an email address shown in the listing. Scammers never want you to use eBay's Ask the Seller a Question feature.

Scammers lure you to 'strike a deal' whereby they give you a fake invoice that looks as if it comes from eBay e.g. aw-confirm@ebay.com or transaction@ebay.com, but it is all bogus. They can do this with any Yahoo! Mail Plus account.

Scammers can even send you to a fake shipping or escrow site where your item is shown to be held. They then want you to pay via Western Union or Money Gram while you think your item is held by a 'trustworthy' third-party. Of course, once payment is made the scam is complete.

Do not be fooled! There is NO buyer protection whatsoever and you will have NO recourse through eBay.

Remember eBay's Marketplace Safety Tip:

Never pay for your eBay item through instant wire transfer services such as Western Union or MoneyGram. These payment methods are unsafe when paying someone you do not know. The fraudsters rely on you to pay via these unsafe methods so that they can stay anonymous.

I apologize for the 'full on' nature of the warning. Time is of the essence in some cases.

Please do not tip off your scammer as it may stop me getting more warnings out to others.

Stay safe.

A scambuster
and member of Team Whack a Hack

PS ~~ Please be aware that since you have revealed your email address to the thief, in days to come the scammer can send out fake 2nd Chance offers or fake eBay security emails to try and phish YOUR login details. Do not click on ANY links within their emails as they could send you to phishing sites. Always login to eBay from a trusted bookmark and check for the padlocked https:// secure address URL.