Omega Owners Forum
Chat Area => General Discussion Area => Topic started by: mijfife on 04 January 2007, 11:21:51
-
Hi folks, just thought I'd warn you about an ebay scam that I havent seen before. I received the following message through ebay messages today
Contact from tjquicken65
tjquicken65( -1)
Positive feedback: 0%
Member since: 04-Dec-06
Location: LA, United States
Registered on: www.motors.ebay.com
Item: 1999 VAUXHALL OMEGA GLS AUTO ESTATE, LPG /DUAL/BI FUEL (110072255254)
This message was sent while the listing was active.
tjquicken65 is a potential buyer.
Hello,
My name is Lucy Avian.
I am interested in your item. The problem is that I am a very confused as I've seen another item very similar to yours.
Please, have a look:
hxxp://3422784404/?motors.listings.ebay.com/Cars-Trucks_W0QQa10239ZQ2d24QQa10244ZQ2d24QQa38v1yZQQa38v2yZQQa39ZQ2d24QQa39705ZQ2d24QQa
I pasted the link into my browser and it took me to an ebay sign in page. I stupidly signed in, not suspecting anything amiss as the message came via ebay. It didn't take me to the page I was expecting and it was then I realised that it was a scam. >:( I changed my password immediately and have notified ebay. Since then, I've had another two identical messages from other users!!
Just thought I'd warn everyone in case you are selling something and get the same.
Cheers Jim
-
The clue is in the link as it is hxxp not http
-
Common enough - bt of url masking going on their. If you use a decent mail client, hover over link and you should get tooltip saying where its going... ...if its not x.ebay.co.uk then its scam. Also, you never follow links in email.
-
i had a scam e-mail the other day, about my Barclays account asking to confirm my details.
You have to be careful with these things, mijifife another clue was he kept referring to your car as an "item" also he is based in the U.S.A ;)
I had my eBay hacked a year or so ago, never filled in any forms so don't know how it happened. But i am always extra careful looking at emails from any company's that have my credit card details on file :y
-
I would never normally follow a link in an email but I assumed in this case that because it had come via ebay itself, it was genuine :-[ Oh well, lesson learnt and I won't fall for that one again >:(
Cheers Jim
-
I despise beyond all comprehension the evil cheating scumbags that do this kind of thing and try to fool people.
Makes me >:(
-
I despise beyond all comprehension the evil cheating scumbags that do this kind of thing and try to fool people.
Makes me >:(
I agree though would not be quite as articulate as you.
-
I'm more angry with myself for getting caught out, I'm usually so careful with these things :-[
Oh well, if the warning saves anyone on here from getting scammed then it's not all bad and I did manage to change my password right away. Fortunately the paypal password is different so that should be okay too. I'll just keep an eye out for unusal activity on my account over the next while!
Cheers Jim
-
I'm more angry with myself for getting caught out, I'm usually so careful with these things :-[
Oh well, if the warning saves anyone on here from getting scammed then it's not all bad and I did manage to change my password right away. Fortunately the paypal password is different so that should be okay too. I'll just keep an eye out for unusal activity on my account over the next while!
Cheers Jim
Also, if you use same password on any other common site - banks, amazon, play etc - change it there as well ;)
-
I'm more angry with myself for getting caught out, I'm usually so careful with these things :-[
Oh well, if the warning saves anyone on here from getting scammed then it's not all bad and I did manage to change my password right away. Fortunately the paypal password is different so that should be okay too. I'll just keep an eye out for unusal activity on my account over the next while!
Cheers Jim
Happens to us all Jim - Main thing is you changed it immediately.
Any bites with the ad for the Omega yet? If only it had been 3 days earlier :'(
-
Yep Mark, it's just sold, see my other post in this section :y
Cheers Jim
-
Disable HTML email and you won't have this problem, as it's nigh impossible to obfuscate stuff in plain text :) It also screws up 90% of spam mail too which is an added bonus.
HTML should never have crept into e-mail in the first place, totally unnecessary. Once again, we can all thank sir bill and his "embrace, extend, destroy" policies for that one. Ever looked at the source of an e-mail sent from Outlook? A message with two words manages to end up being about 2k of pointless, illegible gibberish, one of the reasons I avoid it like the disease it is.
-
Disable HTML email and you won't have this problem, as it's nigh impossible to obfuscate stuff in plain text :) It also screws up 90% of spam mail too which is an added bonus.
HTML should never have crept into e-mail in the first place, totally unnecessary. Once again, we can all thank sir bill and his "embrace, extend, destroy" policies for that one. Ever looked at the source of an e-mail sent from Outlook? A message with two words manages to end up being about 2k of pointless, illegible gibberish, one of the reasons I avoid it like the disease it is.
While plain text was fine for when us internet users were all geeks, it is not suitable now for the masses. A formatable text was necessary. The implementation with both RTF and HTML could have been better, but most mail clients do give enough clues. Plus, don't follow mail links!
Also, plain text won't show a cleverly rewritten URL, as we tend to only look at first part of URL, and often expect unreadable text after it (most pages are now dynamically generated and tracked), so its easy to make a URL that starts http://www.omegaowners.comxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx where x is a series of specific numbers that goes to a completely different site...
-
I missed the whole "internet for geeks" thing actually, first time I even saw the internet in action was 1996 I think when I was in school, and by then it was well on the way to being layman-ised.
I still think there's no need for HTML in e-mail, it just causes loads of clutter, retards do stupid things like turn on comic-sans 24pt with yellow background making it illegible, and it's a spammers dream as there are so many ways to get around the filters like the current favourite of embedding a hyperlinked image with all the junk text so the filters can't parse it.
If you *really* need to do fancy stuff (and I don't mean what M$ put it there for, like bold and underline and other crap) then what's wrong with an attachment? MIME attachments work on almost every mail client I've used, if you're desperate to show off your HTML skills then a separate extension that I can open in my chosen browser will do the job. Likewise use a filetype appropriate to what you're trying to convey, rather than cramming it all into a bloated, illegible HTML e-mail. Either that or just post a URL link in the mail.
I click on e-mail links all the time, and funnily enough I've never been stung. That's because plain text makes it difficult to obfuscate, and personally I consider links like login.ebay.com-jsdufusdf.ru to be rather obviously not the real deal.
-
Firstly, MS did not invent HTML or RTF email.
Secondly, any attachment should not use email. MIME (and others) are inefficient, and not what smtp was designed to transfer.
Thirdly, as I said in an earlier post, it is equally easy to hide a URL in text email - there is a well known way to do this. Its spottable, but then so is a fake html link if your email client is fairly new.
I'm not saying MS's implementation of html or rtf email is ideal - the rtf one in particular did have a few flaws in early days... ...but everyone else's has had issues.
I am certainly not a fan of MS, and really do not like some of the things they are doing with Vista and Longhorn. But I have to concede they are the best option for the vast majority. Hence, I do not buy into this M$ are evil and must be avoided at all costs fad. I deal with many OS vendors - MS, Novell/Suse, Sun Microsystems, RedHat etc, and MS are by far the best for resolving issues, and quickly releasing patches for faults and flaws.
-
The other big Ebay scam is that you get a bankers draft for more than your item is worth. You bank the cq and when it clears (day 5) punter asks you to send the difference via Western Union or similar having taken off £50 for your inconvenience. Next day the cq bounces and your left with your item less the money you've sent on.
The worst case of this I read about was £5000 sent for a Bow (as in arrow) worth £300. Young lad sent £4650 and is left crying to his mum after being scammed. Police can't trace cash so he's lost out :'(
-
I dislike HTML emails as well - too big and they annoy me
-
I recently received emails from alleged ebay buyer stating that i had left negative feedback and that unless I withdrew it then negative would be left for me. I queried the item etc and was sent a link, but this did not work. A few days later an identical mail was received from a different 'buyer' and when queried the link opened an ebay sign in page, but I didn't go any further.
-
They didn't invent HTML or RTF (there aren't many things M$ did actually invent ;)) but they certainly contributed a large part of the poisoning of the net with it. They decided a loooong time back that HTML should be the default for e-mail, so when non-computer-savvy gran decides to send a mail saying nothing more than "thanks dear" it gets wrapped up in loads of completely superfluous hypertext markup for absolutely no reason whatsoever. That was the start, now half the mail I get from Outlook users has all the line breaks screwed up and other general crappiness, even though the mails rarely contain anything other than some text.
I don't think mime is a particularly elegant solution either, but let's face it there was a demand to attach stuff to mail so the option was put there, in a standard way, for people to use if desired. Most mails don't contain MIME attachments, they're only used when the user chooses to use it, and even then I can simply discard the attachments. HTML mail is much more of a PITA - I'm fed up getting crap like "Your client doesn't support HTML mail, please upgrade"... Yes it does support it but I've deliberately chosen to disable HTML support so I don't have to read mail from retards who can't stick to some simple standards. Needless to say those mails go straight in the trash. Besides I do occasionally read my mail via telnet over an SSH link and I don't want to be picking through bloody hypertext just to try and read a simple text message body.
Contrary to the impression I may be creating, I don't hate M$ and have used their products for years - I have licences for XP Pro, Office Pro, Visual Studio and probably some others I've forgotten. However there are certain things that really p... me off with them, such as the whole "embrace, extend, destroy" thing they done with IE to basically force out all other vendors by leveraging their Windows monopoly to get a browser monopoly then introducing loads of new non-standard stuff so other stuff would have compatibility problems etc... The only reason IE wasn't updated (other than patches) for years is because their monopoly status made it difficult for others to switch, even though there have been much better products out there for ages.
They also tried (or are still trying?) to leverage their monopoly to get into the media markets... such as the threats to apple over quicktime etc. They basically forced OEMs to bundle *only* Windows on PCs, no other operating systems allowed otherwise the licence price went through the roof - basically unaffordable and you can't dump windows cos it has the monopoly!
Remember that M$ were found guilty of anti-trust violations in the US, but it was swept under the carpet when the Bush administration came to power in 2000. Likewise they were found guilty of anti-trust in the EU over media markets. And at the moment they're still failing to comply with EU rulings for them to provide interoperability documentation so that they can't leverage their desktop monopoly into server markets too, as they've been trying to do for god knows how long.
M$ make some good products, but their business practices are right up there with the worst of them. And quite frankly I don't trust them which is why I refuse to have Windows Genuine disadvantage installed on any of my PCs, and I'm very doubtful of whether I'll ever "upgrade" to Vista cos god knows what's next. There are other OSes out there that do the job just fine, and when the inevitable need for Windows arises (due to that M$ monopoly yet again) I can just fire up a copy of VMWare Player (which is free to download) running my previously paid for copy of WinXP Pro.
-
They didn't invent HTML or RTF (there aren't many things M$ did actually invent ;)) but they certainly contributed a large part of the poisoning of the net with it. They decided a loooong time back that HTML should be the default for e-mail, so when non-computer-savvy gran decides to send a mail saying nothing more than "thanks dear" it gets wrapped up in loads of completely superfluous hypertext markup for absolutely no reason whatsoever. That was the start, now half the mail I get from Outlook users has all the line breaks screwed up and other general crappiness, even though the mails rarely contain anything other than some text.
I don't think mime is a particularly elegant solution either, but let's face it there was a demand to attach stuff to mail so the option was put there, in a standard way, for people to use if desired. Most mails don't contain MIME attachments, they're only used when the user chooses to use it, and even then I can simply discard the attachments. HTML mail is much more of a PITA - I'm fed up getting crap like "Your client doesn't support HTML mail, please upgrade"... Yes it does support it but I've deliberately chosen to disable HTML support so I don't have to read mail from retards who can't stick to some simple standards. Needless to say those mails go straight in the trash. Besides I do occasionally read my mail via telnet over an SSH link and I don't want to be picking through bloody hypertext just to try and read a simple text message body.
Contrary to the impression I may be creating, I don't hate M$ and have used their products for years - I have licences for XP Pro, Office Pro, Visual Studio and probably some others I've forgotten. However there are certain things that really p... me off with them, such as the whole "embrace, extend, destroy" thing they done with IE to basically force out all other vendors by leveraging their Windows monopoly to get a browser monopoly then introducing loads of new non-standard stuff so other stuff would have compatibility problems etc... The only reason IE wasn't updated (other than patches) for years is because their monopoly status made it difficult for others to switch, even though there have been much better products out there for ages.
They also tried (or are still trying?) to leverage their monopoly to get into the media markets... such as the threats to apple over quicktime etc. They basically forced OEMs to bundle *only* Windows on PCs, no other operating systems allowed otherwise the licence price went through the roof - basically unaffordable and you can't dump windows cos it has the monopoly!
Remember that M$ were found guilty of anti-trust violations in the US, but it was swept under the carpet when the Bush administration came to power in 2000. Likewise they were found guilty of anti-trust in the EU over media markets. And at the moment they're still failing to comply with EU rulings for them to provide interoperability documentation so that they can't leverage their desktop monopoly into server markets too, as they've been trying to do for god knows how long.
M$ make some good products, but their business practices are right up there with the worst of them. And quite frankly I don't trust them which is why I refuse to have Windows Genuine disadvantage installed on any of my PCs, and I'm very doubtful of whether I'll ever "upgrade" to Vista cos god knows what's next. There are other OSes out there that do the job just fine, and when the inevitable need for Windows arises (due to that M$ monopoly yet again) I can just fire up a copy of VMWare Player (which is free to download) running my previously paid for copy of WinXP Pro.
With reference to a need for attachments, many users could argue there is an equal need for a formatted text system, such as html... ...and only a tiny minority are going to be manually reading email via telnet...
Poisoning the net? If HTML email 'poisoned' the net, then so did the worldwide web. Same technology, same browser dll's that render, same vulnerabilities. Same masked links.
IE won the battle with Netscape simply because it was a better product - Netscape screwed themselves with poor design and poor management of their development. Equally, Media Player is possibly the best all round player (assuming you are licenced).
Yes, MS OEM practices could be considered harsh, but no different to other industries - I know our previous company car rules stipulated one manufacturer, simply because to get the right price, it was an exclusive arrangement...
I too have some concerns at some of the things in Vista. Some of these restrictions (HD video content restrictions) will have to go in to other OSes as well if they want to play HD content...
If your XP is retail, you can legally run under VM, if OEM, then you cant...