Thursday, August 03, 2006

Something Phishy Here?

Having been stupid for the second time on eBay and bought a Japanese Xbox - my son came to me in a pique of enthusiasm explaining that there was an Xbox 360 available on eBay for only £100 and the auction had only 2 mins to go, well, £140 plus £20 p&p later I was the proud only of an Xbox 360 tied to the Japan region, a fact that became clear soon after the auction had completed when I rather belatedly read the details of what my son had me buy a few moments earlier. Some weeks later having decided to cut my losses, I went to a shop - yes these quaint establishments still exist - and got a second hand Xbox 360 for £165, this one both included a power supply [the other would have needed me to spend £60 on a power supply], would play UK games, and would allow the Xbox Live connection to work. So what to do with the Japanese one, well obviously it would have to go back onto eBay.
Imagine my delight when I discovered someone had bid £180 to purchase this marvellous device which was not including the additional postage of £19.99. This delight was somewhat tempered when I discovered that the bidder was in Australia. In any case, for the amount offered I was ready to ship the goodies half way round the world. I then went to read my email, and found an email from the buyer saying "I have made the Paypal payment in good faith, please advise when you have shipped the product, blah, blah" and also two other emails allegedly from Paypal, nicely decorated with Paypal logos and things saying that this person had registered a payment for me and that I simply needed to email a shipping tracking number to them and the payment would be granted. Fortunately I noticed that the email had come from an address paypalworldwidecustomer@usa.com and thought that this looked decidely dodgy. So I logged onto Paypal to find out if they had advice on how to check the validity of emails from Paypal. The advice was to forward suspicious mails to spoof@paypal.com, so I did this and sure enough the mail was not from Paypal. Yet another dodgy dealer. Returning to eBay Clara_100 from Oz was no longer registered, and no feedback could be left. More of the submerged Iceberg!