EBAY fraud alert

From: Wesley Widner <kai_at_techie.com>
Date: Wed Sep 3 03:51:00 2003

Sometimes sysadmins like to keep old accounts that are getting a lot of
spam open so that they can train their anti-spam software's heuristics.
Alternately most mailserver configurations are set to blindly accept
anything to _at_theirdomain to keep spammers from guessing valid user
accounts.

----
---Wesley Widner
--
-
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk-admin_at_classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-admin_at_classiccmp.org]
On Behalf Of Jerome H. Fine
Sent: Monday, September 01, 2003 8:51 AM
To: cctalk_at_classiccmp.org
Subject: Re: EBAY fraud alert
>"Zane H. Healy" wrote:
> > This is a rather common scam that has been going on for about a year
or
> > so. It has spread to PayPal, and is one of the rationalizations that
> > ebay is using to force all users to change from email address IDs to
an
> > alias. If Ebay is doing anything about these scams, they are keeping
it
> > a secret.
> eBay is forcing users to change from an email address to an alias?
This is
> the first I've heard about it.  I know they won't let you get a new
account
> and use your email address as they want to control peoples ability to
reach
> you.  I've not seen anything that says that I have to change mine to
an
> alias.  Personally I like that people are able to easily find my email
> address on eBay.
Jerome Fine replies:
I have a comment and a question!
I have an OLD e-mail address from an ISP that I cancelled 2 years ago.
It still seems to be active since I can send an e-mail to the address:
Jerome Fine <jhfine_at_idirect.com>
and it does not get rejected.  I used that e-mail address with eBay when
I first signed up with eBay to request information and send in bids.  Of
course, I can't pick up any e-mails that eBay sends, let alone the 30
spam
a day that I was receiving at the end, but my old e-mail address still
seems
to be acting as a bit bucket since I just sent a test message to it.
AND as far as eBay is concerned, my user id is still
<jhfine_at_idirect.com>
and I can still ask a question of a vendor by supplying:
user id: jhfine_at_idirect.com
password: xxxxxx
so, it must all still be working as far as eBay is concerned and eBay
still
accepts and allows an OLD user ID with an _at_ character.
Question:  As far as the OLD  ISP is concerned, is there any way that
a user can at least pick up e-mails that are still sent to that old
address
as long as the ISP is still accepting them?
Question: Is there anything as far as practice goes on the internet that
requires an ISP who accepts an e-mail (i.e. without rejecting it) to at
least forward that e-mail to the old original person even if that person
no longer has a paid for account?
Sincerely yours,
Jerome Fine
--
If you attempted to send a reply and the original e-mail
address has been discontinued due a high volume of junk
e-mail, then the semi-permanent e-mail address can be
obtained by replacing the four characters preceding the
'at' with the four digits of the current year.

Received on Wed Sep 03 2003 - 03:51:00 BST