Ebay Account Hacked! What Now?

raptorman

A friend of mine has had their ebay account by someone in the USA. The first thing she new about it was a series of 10 emails in her inbox this morning confirming second chance offers on $2-3000 dollar motorbikes. Her ebay account and paypal accounts have both been suspended. My question is what happens now?

soolin

Your friend needs to get in contact with ebay immediately to ensure that they are handling the situation otherwise she might end up with all sorts of problems.

If anything was bought or sold while her account was hacked she could have outstanding chargebacks against her or fraudulent payments made in her name.

She will also undoubtably end up with a lot of stick from other friends as she must have either fallen for a basic phishing email or compromised her password somehow. As several motorbikes were mentioned this sounds like a deliberate scam and is more likely therefore that she gave all her account details and passwords to a scammer via a phishing mail.

Depending on how secure the rest of her information is, and if she can fall for a scam she might also be insecure in other financial matters, she should immediately contact any credit card companies or banks associated with either the paypal or ebay account as they may have those details as well. She should warn them that she has compromised her details and ask them to either cancel accounts or watch for unusual transactions.

Finally, please point your friend in the direction of the ebay help pages about staying safe on ebay so this doesn't happen again.

She will get this sorted, ebay and paypal are fairly good at sorting through this type of problem , but it might take a while before she gets the use of her account back.

Soo

raptorman

Thanks Soo

She is very strict about the emails that she opens, to the point that she deletes them if she doesn't know who they are from. Is there a chance that her email has been hacked for the information as the first thing she new about this was the 10 emails confirming second chance offers. Nothing was showing in her 'My Ebay' section, so in effect she really had no idea this had happened.

Also ebay must be able to see that she is registered in the UK and not USA where the second chance offers have been made. I was speaking to her last night and she said she feels like her house has been broken into. Also upto now she had 100% positive feedback, will this have any effect on her rating?

She has contacted ebay (LONG DIFFICULT PROCESS) and changed all her passwords to her ebay/bank accounts.

Thanks again for all your help.

g33za

i would also suggest if she does any banking online to check her accounts in case of her system being compromised by a keylogger

soolin

raptorman wrote:

Thanks Soo

She is very strict about the emails that she opens, to the point that she deletes them if she doesn't know who they are from. Is there a chance that her email has been hacked for the information as the first thing she new about this was the 10 emails confirming second chance offers. Nothing was showing in her 'My Ebay' section, so in effect she really had no idea this had happened.

Also ebay must be able to see that she is registered in the UK and not USA where the second chance offers have been made. I was speaking to her last night and she said she feels like her house has been broken into. Also upto now she had 100% positive feedback, will this have any effect on her rating?

She has contacted ebay (LONG DIFFICULT PROCESS) and changed all her passwords to her ebay/bank accounts.

Thanks again for all your help.

If the account was truly hacked then she has to have given someone her password either intentionally via a phishing mail, or by leaving herself logged on maybe at work or in a public library or something?

There are fake second chance offers going around and I remember reading about them on the alt ebay group but can't remember what the scam was. However, the fact that her ebay and paypal acocunt were suspended by ebay means that they saw unusual behaviour and blocked her account before too much damage could be done, so it must have been compromised.

The fact that second chance offers were sent out via a US address and not a Uk address won't have triggered anything on the ebay system as genuine users can end up in the sill ysituation (like a friend of mine) who registered while she was living in germany and hsa now returned to the UK. Her address and details have all been changed successfully to show UK but her registration details still show as having registered in germany!

Her feedback shouldn't be affected if ebay closed the account quick enough, however it may take some time to sort out as there still might be disgruntled buyers who believe they have actually bought somehting from her and who might try and leave feedback if the account is reinstated. This is alittle unlikely though.

Soo

trace-j

raptorman wrote:

Thanks Soo

She is very strict about the emails that she opens, to the point that she deletes them if she doesn't know who they are from. Is there a chance that her email has been hacked for the information as the first thing she new about this was the 10 emails confirming second chance offers. Nothing was showing in her 'My Ebay' section, so in effect she really had no idea this had happened.

Also ebay must be able to see that she is registered in the UK and not USA where the second chance offers have been made. I was speaking to her last night and she said she feels like her house has been broken into. Also upto now she had 100% positive feedback, will this have any effect on her rating?

She has contacted ebay (LONG DIFFICULT PROCESS) and changed all her passwords to her ebay/bank accounts.

Thanks again for all your help.

The exact same thing happened to my other half, some !!!!!! hacked his account. The first thing he knew of it was that there was an email in his inbox confirming change of password! He too is very strict about emails he opens and very savvy with all things computers. It got sorted same as you've described, but all ebay could say is he shouldn't respond to suspect emails.

We still don't know to this day how it happened, we've always had anti-virus, anti-spyware, firewall and the computers are on a network so no direct access to a phone line.

I don't know why ebay just don't design a more robust/secure website so it is more difficult to hijack accounts. I think there's more going on then just phising emails and keylogging.

richto

I suddenly found myself logged in as someone else yesterday with full access to their account, and what is more interesting, the login has been cached on my browser and still lets me in - and lets me use it to enter pasword requests - although I have no idea what the actual password is.

I finally realised it must have been a friend of mine who logged into Ebay via my PC about two months ago and his credentials are still cached - so be careful!

soolin

richto wrote:

I suddenly found myself logged in as someone else yesterday with full access to their account, and what is more interesting, the login has been cached on my browser and still lets me in - and lets me use it to enter pasword requests - although I have no idea what the actual password is.

I finally realised it must have been a friend of mine who logged into Ebay via my PC about two months ago and his credentials are still cached - so be careful!

I was in the library a few weeks back and they have pc terminals that you can use by the hour with a payment card.

There was a huge kerfuffle and me being nosy sort of hung around to listen in. Turns out that a young student had booked the PC and found it already logged on so not being aware he had to log in as himself just used the PC as normal. This wouldn't have been spotted and the original user would have received all the charges on his card. However, the reason for the kerfuffle was that the student had tried to access a banned site, he claimed he was a medical student and needed some information. The library access is very restricted by a net nanny as Children have unsupervised access so it is entirely possible he was really only looking at something relatively harmless.

However this attempt to log into a banned site triggered something and he was being told that it would be noted automatically on his user details and a monthly audit was done which was reported to the police if necessary. However the warning was on the original users ID and not the student!

They were trying to phone the original user as I left to explain to him the result of having not logged out when he left the PC.
Soo

wendytiggermad

The same happened to me on two occaisons the first one i noticed 40 mobile phones being listed in my name, i stopped this as instructed by ebay, the second i the first i knew was ebay suspending my account as THEY had noticed someone had unlawfully used my account. I am wondering if ebay need to tighten up on their security.

soolin

wendytiggermad wrote:

The same happened to me on two occaisons the first one i noticed 40 mobile phones being listed in my name, i stopped this as instructed by ebay, the second i the first i knew was ebay suspending my account as THEY had noticed someone had unlawfully used my account. I am wondering if ebay need to tighten up on their security.

It doesn't matter how much ebay tighten up if people still compromise their details. It's not ebays fault that people are careless.

Ebay and paypal, and all the banks for that matter, send out oodles of info about keeping your information safe. They tell you not to follow links in emails, they tell you to change your passwords frequently and make sure they are a mix of letters and numbers and not an easily guessed word.

It doesn't matter how often they do all that people still happily use one password for all their information, don't bother doing a proper log out and still think that phishing mails are genuine.

The internet, or life really, can't be made safe if people think it won't happen to them. We seem to trust the internet more than we should by happily sharing personal information about ourselves, yet if we were out on the high street would we give our bank details and PIN number to a woman who stopped us in the street wearing a Barclays bank badge and uniform and pretending to be from barclays Bank? I would hope not.

Soo