Blog Bloke has gone phishing

This evening I received an odd email allegedly from eBay. Let me show you how I sniffed out this fraud so you can save yourself a lot of grief if it should ever happen to you. Here is part of the email that I received:

Now lucky for me I don’t recall ever having an eBay account so my suspicions were immediately aroused. But I have to admit it sure looked official. It had the official logo. The wording sounding legitimate and very business-like. It even had just the right amount of fear-factor built into it that immediately grabbed my attention.

So let’s have a closer look at it shall we? When I hovered my mouse over the link it displayed http://www.ebay.com. So far so good. BUT when I right-clicked the link it displayed a different address: http://research.bisp.com/phpMyAdmin/lang/.www.ebay.com/
.eBay/index.htm.

Hmmm, now that address seemed a little odd to me. So I tried to copy and paste a sentence or two of the notice into google, but I couldn’t because it was a graphic with a link embedded into it.

By this time my suspicions were aroused. I was fairly sure that it had to be a fraud but I wanted to find out for certain. So I typed the first sentence (above with quotes) into google and loe and behold this site came up. It was an anti-phishing website along with a notice announcing that it was a scam. So it seems my suspicions were right after all.

What is an email phishing scam?

So what’s the moral of the story? Be suspicious of any unsolicited email that asks for your private info. Check it out first before clicking on that link. And that goes for attachments too. Even if you receive something from a friend, ask them first if they really sent it to you because that little click could end up costing you a lot of grief.