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Saturday, July 26, 2003
It's more complicated than it appears 
Taking turns
ePayScam
| | I finally got eBay's fax to take the latest round of documentation requests required by no other online ebusiness provider I know of. The result, apparently, was these two emails: |
| | Your PayPal Account has been Restored
Your PayPal Account has been Limited |
| | So I called eBay, found that my account was, indeed, finally okay. (Which is wonderful. I can finally buy that espresso machine.) And they had no record of having sent out another account limitation notification. |
| | Then I noticed that the email wasn't to me. It was to the address on the Cluetrain site, which gets forwarded to each of the four co-authors. Being a public address, it attracts a lot of spam. |
| | I also noticed the email was in HTML. I have a no-HTML mail pref set at my eBay account. |
| | The source of the email, I saw, was in Brazil. |
| | The email instructs the user to confirm their email address, credit card, and account ATM PIN. Of course this isn't quite possible on a PayPal account — at least not in the way the email instructs. |
| | So I'm sure the spamscammers are expecting a few recipients to fail with eBay and to instead provide the requested information in an email reply. |
| | I'm sure none of us are that dumb, but I've come close. |
| | At eBay's request, I forwared the mail to their fraud department. |
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