I've often wondered about this ridiculous scam and why it succeeds. After all, why would anyone give a complete stranger access to that kind of money? Why wouldn't they go to a reputable financial institution for help. The gullibility of people who believe this kind of junk has always amazed me.

Since yesterday, though, I finally understand! I have repeatedly cautioned my students and ezine readers about the fake eBay emails that are all over the Net. The scam is that your eBay account has some sort of problem and unless it is updated, it can no longer be used. The victim is directed to a page which asks for all pertinent information about his eBay account. Of course, eBay has nothing to do with this and the Bad Guys now have valuable information which they use to defraud others.

To underscore my warning, I actually copied a page from one of these criminals. I left the page there for my students and readers and thought no more about it - until yesterday, when we received a call from eBay: apparently the search engines picked up the page and “large numbers” of people filled out the form on my teaching page. eBay was not at all upset with us, but they did ask us to modify the page in some way so people wouldn't fill it out. Of course, we removed it immediately. But, it's still amazing because this was the URL of the page:

http://auctionknowhow.com/listing/scumbags.shtml

First of all, the website isn't ebay. Secondly, it includes the word “scumbags”. Would criminals really put that in their dishonest listings? So, I find it amazing that anyone would actually take this page seriously! But I do understand the Nigerian scam and others now ... it's strictly about NUMBERS! Send out enough of this garbage and a certain percentage of people will fall into your trap.