Identity thieves are using a tricky email scam to try to steal the login information for your eBay, PayPal, or other online account. This emphasizes the importance of keeping alert: Be extremely suspicious of anyone who contacts you unsolicited and asks for personal information, such as a username, password, or credit card number.
I've seen this scam reported in the news, and I've received two of them myself in recent days. On the surface, the email might appear to be an authentic communication from a company you have a relationship with. But it's really part of a scheme to gain your Web site login information. Once they have access to your eBay or PayPal account, identity thieves can hijack it for their own purposes and gain access to personal information contained in the account.
Here's a message I received the other day, purporting to be a request for an update to my e-Gold account:
(Big hint that this is a scam: I don't have an e-Gold account. However, I do have PayPal and eBay accounts; I received a similar come-on targeted at PayPal users and have seen reports of an eBay scam as well. The crooks don't have to know whether you actually are an eBay or PayPal user. They just send out a large blanket spam, knowing that eBay and PayPal have large user bases -- they're bound to hit a lot of real users of those services, some of whom will get sucked in.)
Now this looks like a pretty simple, innocuous message, no? After all, the URL does lead to the secure server at e-gold.com, doesn't it?
Absolutely not -- don't fall for a trick like this! In spite of its barebones appearance, this is actually an HTML email message. The e-Gold URL is phony. Take a look at the underlying HTML code for this message:
From this, you'll see that clicking on the "URL" in this email message will actually take you to a Web page at http://212.159.182.13/e-gold/. (By now, this URL no longer exists; the crooks have done their dirty work and moved on.) The IP address 212.159.182.13 is definitely not the e-Gold login page. It's a fake page based on the e-Gold design but under the control of the identity thieves. Here's the page at http://212.159.182.13/e-gold/, which I was sent to when I clicked on the fake URL:
