Do ebay actually investigate spoof emails?

mad-mum_3

All i ever seem to get is the standard emails at set intervals. Now either I am a cynic or they are very good at investigating everything sent to them in a fixed time!!

Also how come I only get these after I have bough or sold something on ebay. how do the spoof emailers know?

indiegirl_2

Absolutely no idea. I expect that the emails get 'filed' until a certain number have been received from the same person, and then investigations occur.

I share your frustration - I've got a buyer who's kept all their email addresses and randomly spams everyone offering them items that they're selling on eBay... I've had it twice now and each time I've reported it I've had the same tinpot reply. In the end I mailed the seller to tell them that I didn't approve of their retention of customer email addresses for unwanted marketing information (I also dropped in that I'd reported them to eBay). Whether anything will happen I have no idea; we can only sit and wait...

mad-mum_3

I bought from someone local to me and he thought that was good reason to send me further emails but I warned him I would report him and he stopped! I will think twice about the "convenience" of a local purchase in future. overall I like ebay though

Astaroth

There really isnt that much that they can do being realistic about things. It is easy to find out who is hosting the website that the email points to and I would imagine the majority of these are willing to take down the site if/ when eBay advise them of the activity - I have rechecked these websites at a later date and they have been taken down.

What is difficult to do of cause is to actually find the people behind the site and in almost all cases due to data protection (and other countries equivalent) it would require an international police involvement to even attempt to do this... I think that most police would decide they have more important things to do than potentially involve 10 different countries police forces to trace someone who could be simply trying to harvest email addresses.

JohalaReewi

They do have a look at them! I had a phishy looking ebay email which I sent to spoof at ebay and after the standard email response, I later got an email from Ebay saying this was actually a genuine email from some marketing company they use to do surveys. I have no idea if they follow up real spoof emails.

carrie483

Ebay probably get thousands of these emails forwarded to them every day. They can't honestly be expected to respond to each person.

mad-mum_3

I accept that they cannot be expected to respond to each one and I am glad to hear that they have actually responded that an email was genuine. I just thought that they may only be paying lip service to any attempt to deal with the problem and I would rather they just said "tough live with it" than pretended to have some investigation. Most of the time i just forward the emails to the spoof@ebay email address and shrug them off but some recent ones have been very abusive and threatening and whilst viewed in the cold light of day with my sensible head on can be just shrugged off it is a different matter when first opened.

black-saturn

Once I accidentally forwarded the daily status email onto them instead of the spoof one. They still sent me an email back saying that the email didnt originate from ebay. So my answer to that is they dont look at any of them.

black-saturn

Also I've noticed that since I changed by ebay email to a hotmail one I havn't had any more spoofs.

downie_2

Phishing attempts and other fraud can be forwarded to me and I will pursue the hosts and registrars of the site/email address - or pass them on to PIRT at http://castlecops.com/pirt
who specialise in just phish.