last time I listed something for sale on ebay, I received an e-mail message asking me how much it would cost to ship the item to California. the message appeared to come through the ebay messaging system (with all the graphics), and appeared to be genuine. (I wondered why a guy in California would be asking about the price of shipping, but was not otherwise suspicious.) So I hit the yellow button to reply, and it took me to the ebay log-in screen. I logged-in to ebay and two seconds later, I looked at the URL and realized that I was on some other server (not ebay). I had just logged in, and in the process given my log-in information to this crook, so I switched computers, logged into ebay, and changed my password.

I reported this to ebay, they confirmed that it was a spoof / crook. their recommendation was to reply to "ebay messages" only through the ebay messaging system (which appears on "My Ebay"), but this can be cumbersome.

the lesson here -- be very careful with messages that appear to be coming through the ebay messaging system, just as you are careful with all the phishing messages that you get from yoru bank, the credit card companies, etc.

Jeff

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: now that is a well thought out way of doing it
: that would have caught most careful people
: out.