My sense is that these eBay scams are really going crazy all of a sudden. On top of old fashioned phishing emails, there appears to be a new scam:
Three different auctions I have bid on in the last week have been altered by apparent scammers or hackers. In those cases, someone actually logs into the seller account and cancels all the bids on the auction, then sends phishing emails to all those bidders, through the eBay system, offering the item for whatever their high bid was, or sometimes for some other set price.
Typically they attempt to get you to wire money via Western Union or the like and will come up with baroque stories about why they can not receive paypal.
I contacted the real sellers and they were mystified as to what happened. Suddenly all the bids were cancelled and neither they nor the bidders were doing the cancelling. I don't know if eBay is dealing with this or not, but it's worrying, because it seems to indicate that people can hack accounts at will. Perhaps the sellers had previously fallen victim to phishing scams that led them to give up their passwords or the like.
A good rule in these situations is that if it's too good to be true (e.g. a $1,200 Raleigh for $400 shipped), then it probably isn't true.
Watch your backs!
Ken Bensinger
Brooklyn, NY
> Was it the Atlantis? I bid also and received 2 second chance offers
> supposedly from ebay. I don't bother to respond to those since they are
> always scammers. Reported them to ebay, especially since they were
> poorly done and you could see the real email address they were coming
> from. As usual nothing was done.
> Len Diamond
> Ridgewood, NJ