Three times today I received the following from Ebay:

Dear eBay customer,

During our regularly scheduled account maintenance and verification procedures, we have detected a slight error in your billing information.

This might be due to either of the following reasons:

1. A recent change in your personal information ( i.e.change of address).
2. Submiting invalid information during the initial sign up process.
3. An inability to accurately verify your selected option of payment due to an internal error within our processors.

Please update and verify your information by clicking the link below:

https://arribada.ebay.com/saw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?PlaceCCInfo

If your account information is not updated within 48 hours then your ability to sell or bid on eBay will become restricted.

Thank you

The eBay Billing Deptartment .

The thing is, I have never registered on Ebay, bought or sold anything there. Has anyone had this experience, and if so, what did you do? Thanks in advance. jr

This is called "phishing". Theives send them out to any email address they can find in hopes that a few of the people who get it will respond with their user name and password, thus giving the thief access to their account. I get these all the time from PayPal (I do have an account), eBay (ditto), and Citibank (no account there). Here is more information on eBay phishing.

BTW clicking the link in that email you got will probably download spyware to your computer.

Hey M x 2, thanks a lot. Never got this before, but as I say, three came today. Ran a scan to get rid of any spyware, thanks for that tip too. You still looking at Minot as your next station? jr

You're welcome. I like to read the myths/truths on snopes.com, and I learned about it there.

Nope, not Minot. Closer to NY than that, thankfully.

I get these too, from Ebay,Paypal, Citibank, and several others fairly often. I report them to the following email addresses, and everyone should do the same whenever possible:

spoof@ebay.com

spoof@paypal.com

I dont have an address for Citibank, so I just block sender on them, for all the good that does. There's an address for emails like the one supposedly from Citibank, but I've lost it. I think it had to do with the FBI, but again, not sure. Oh well. LOL

chris

I forgot to mention that--thank you vans. For Citibank, you go here.

I've heard about it here and Look what this idiot did!

How did that turn out for you Clare?

I gave my interview and now I'm just trying to prevent other people from getting scammed like me.

All EBay could tell me is that the site was very sophisticated and it literally "mirrored" their site. The spoof site even told me NOT to give personal information- which I gave my personal information to anyway. dumb dumb dumb

Thanks for asking.

The spoof Citibank site that I got in my email (I'm nosy! lol I don't even have a Citibank account to give them information from!) also had a page on NOT getting caught by spoofers. They're clever. Evil and clever

I wonder if the same perpetrators are running all these scams. Today, for the first time, I got the Citibank e-mail. My server kindly included a message in grey letters "Do not reply to this e-mail as it is an unmonitored alias."

When I get these, I put in outrageous information just to see what happens.
Name: Nonya F Business
Account number: 123446789
User name: some swear word
Password: Wouldn't you like to know
etc...

After you fill out all that, they will direct you to the main site and thank you for providing the information!

I recently saw a space for a social security number. Now that is something I would NEVER do no matter who they are. They are even asking for your mother's maiden name, social security number and bank information. Mx2 is correct. They are very clever.

MTT, Thanks for that Citibank link! Now I can send them their share, LOL.

chris