In my inbox today was the following:

Dear eBay User,

You have received this email because we have strong reasons to believe that your eBay account had been recently compromised. In order to prevent any fraudulent activity from occurring we are required to open an investigation into this matter.

Per the User Agreement, Section 9, we may immediately issue a warning, temporarily suspend, indefinitely suspend or terminate your membership and refuse to provide our services to you if we believe that your actions may cause financial loss or legal liability for you, our users or us. We may also take these actions if we are unable to verify or authenticate any information you
provide to us.

If your account information's are not updated within the next 72 hours, then we will assume this account is fraudulent and will be suspended. We apologize for this inconvenience, but the purpose of this verification is to ensure that your eBay account has not been fraudulently used and to combat fraud.

Please login into your account at this link, which is a SSL secured connection:
Bogus URL Removed

Regards,

Safeharbor Department
eBay, Inc.

While I do not intend to look into the matter further, I strongly suspect that this is an attempt at identity theft. I don't think that eBay would have such a grammatical error.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: DorianGreyed,

Although it looks legitimate, you have nothing to loose in waiting 72 hours and see if they will really cancel your account.Then if they do, you just create a new one. And if you don't get cancelled that would mean, you were right about your suspicions.

This is a mirrored email and is 100% bogus. I got burned by the exact email last year.

See here and here for ways to spot a fake email.

From Clarebears link

quote:

Think an email may be a spoof? Forward it to spoof@ebay.com or spoof@paypal.com.

Can't better that advice

Hey! thats really good to know...Thanks mucho...

Never click a link to access your account at e-bay or paypal.

This scam, unfortuantely, is pretty common. Almost everyone has an Ebay account and a PayPal account. Anyone asking for information regarding your accounts is a scammer. Ebay, and PayPal as well, would never need to contact and ask "what is your username, password, etc..." because they ALREADY know that stuff. Plus, in the event of theft of your account I am about 110% sure they'd have a real person contact via a telephone.

Derek Taylor

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Derek Taylor,

Come to think of it AOL is also targeted by these though they show up as a sore thumb on the internal mail They will have both a blue icon and no @Aol.com address if they are "genuine" official mail
Fakes have a brown icon and an ****@aol.com " addy only other way is to use an AIM screenname but these are traceable
AOL expects you to phone them for info on accounts and answer a security question if needed.
I have only had 1 in recent months on the AOL internal Mail(used to be a dozen or more per week ) So at least AOLs Spam/security policy is working
And if any of these arrive in your mail box forward them to cosmail1@aol.comor cosmail2@aol.com
We must keep reporting these regardless of how few or many we get even if it's companies/websites we never deal with
Don't let a trojan turn your computer into a remote posting center for Spam
Leaving your account password logged in 24/7 was the way 1 of these got onto mine And I got my account suspended for spreading 100 plus spammy mails in 2 sessions
Now I have to Log in manually and I've had no trouble since
I had not got as much spyware protection and A/V programs as now, also I was on Dial-up (now running Broadband)
Worth investigating for peace of mind
PS When I started on AOL (AOL 5) I'd have 20 or more spammy mails to delete per session before dealing with the legit mail
These days (AOL 9) I get only 5 or 6 mails per day all Legit and the Spam folder may be 1, 2? mails tops and that'll be possibly a misdirected posting to be moved into the main email box