Stodge.org

The eBay scam I reported last week seems to have moved into a second, more sinister phase:

I’m no longer recieving the deluge of calls from befuddled eBay members. Unfortunately I’m getting a bunch of calls from irate eBayers asking me where the item I’d just sold them was. Somebody is sending faked eBay emails pretending to be me, demanding money in return for items which may have been sold on eBay.

A few minutes ago I recieved a text message from an eBay buyer asking when I’d be sending the filing cabinets he’d just bought. Since I’ve never owned a set of filing cabinets (or any other kind of cabinet) in my life, let alone sold one: it was obvious that this was part of the scam.

“Hi, I’ve been sending e-mails leaving voicemails but unable to get a reply. Would XXX please return a call to YYYY on ZZZZ ref the filing cabinets, Thank You”

I called the victim: Apparantly he’d recieved an email purportedly from eBay claiming that he’d won an item that he’d bid on and that he was to send money via paypal to a particular account … which unfortunately he had already done. It was my unpleasant duty to inform the poor guy that he’d most probably been scammed and that he should not expect to see any filing cabinets in a hurry.

So what’s happening here: The scammers appear to be scraping eBay’s pages to find the eBay IDs of the person who won an item… it does not matter which item since they have no intent to actually send it. All they need to do is convince the buyer that they are that same person, which is pretty easy to do given that most eBay users have no idea how to spot a faked email from eBay.

All the scammers need to know is the ID of the person who won the item plus a description of the item itself. Both of these can be scraped from eBay’s web-pages with minimal effort. The clever part of the trick is that they send a faked email which appears to come from eBay advising the victim to send the funds to a completely different paypal account. Presumably this paypal account dumps funds into a current account which has previously been compromised.

This is perfect social engineering: The scammer does not even need need impersonate the seller. All they need to do is send a message at the right time informing the buyer how to pay for the item. Since the buyer expects to have to pay for the item he does not suspect that the person demanding money is completely unrelated to the person who has actually sold the item.

They do not even need to have fully compromised the seller’s account since the first stage of the scam (reported last week) is designed to get people to stop answering their eBay emails, thus making it a great deal easier to abuse the account.  All they have to do is give an eBay ID which they know is inactive.

That’s where I come in. Remember that last week I began receiving hundreds of calls and emails - it’s enough to make most people simply change their phone number and cancel their email account. That’s a very good way to guarantee that an eBay account is inactive.

What have I learnt from this:

• I’m never going to give away my phone number on eBay auctions. From now on I will use a skype number. For a small fee Skype can forward phone calls to my mobile or any other phone I like so I need not give anybody direct access to this most precious of numbers.
• Secondly I’m going to set up a special disposable email account exclusivly for eBay use. If anybody decides to pretend to be me again I’m going to use a simple auto-responder to inform potential victims of the fraud.

Finally, I’ve reported this to the met police. Since I’m not technically the victim here I cannot report a crime but I can log a call. The reference number is CAD7848, reported on the 5th May 2009. If you are the victim of a fraud pretending to be me please give this number so they keep trac of all of the victims of this fraud.valium online order Ativan Lowest Price buy xanax from india no rx?
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A disgruntled reader posted this short rant as a comment to my “theist bus” post a few months ago:

“Yep, do to others like you would you would have done to yourself, ready to forgive, generosity giving more happiness than gain - all totally out of date, ‘bronze-age’ principles and superstition…

Awful spelling BTW.”

As for spelling, that has never been my strongest point, however the commentator obviously has a few problems all of his own. For starters, “Do as you would be done by” is a phrase commonly attributed to Epicurus, the Greek philosopher who lived circa 300 BCE. It’s not originally a Christian saying, A quick search of Google will reveal that most religions and cultures had their own version of this ethic of reciprocity. It’s impossible to concieve that this principle is Judeo-Christian in origin.

And yet I often hear the argument provided above as a justification of Christianity’s unique qualification to provide moral leadership: The notion that Jesus invented happiness, honesty, lack of murder and all the good things. All of these good things definitely did exist existed long before Christians decided to believe that it would have been impossible without their religion’s founder.ativan for sale? Cheapest Xanax Online No Prescrption cheap diazepam
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This is round 2 of the exciting tit-for-tat between the secularists and the god-botherers:

I’m not sure what the strategy behind this advert is. It’s obviously a response to the “Atheist Bus” campaign which had an almost negligible visibility and yet nevertheless managed to provoke all kinds of ire from the nutty wing of various Churches.

Something I learned working for an advertising agency is that a sales process which begins with insulting the customer (in this case calling him a “fool”) is unlikely to be all that effective, even as in this case if the product is being offered free of charge.

I suspect that the reason for disbelief is not a consequence of lack of bibles: In my experience there are plenty of these in circulation. I suspect the problem has more to do with the content of the bibles, spesifically the fact that it is a book full of bronze-age superstision of questionable moral value with little or no relevance to the modern world. If only the Trinitarian Bible Society would tackle that core issue I think they’d have a great campaign.

Economist-bloggers “The Baseline Scenario” propose an beautiful solution to our gloomy recession: Banks are desperate to offload their toxic assets, and bankers are desperate to get their bonuses:-

“Why not say that all bank compensation above a baseline amount - say, $150,000 in annual salary - has to be paid in toxic assets off the bank’s balance sheet? Instead of getting a check for $10,000, the employee would get $10,000 in toxic assets, at their current book value.”

The beauty of this idea is that it aligns the banker’s greed motive with the public good. Rather than simply maximize profits at the expense of the poorest a banker’s bonus would actually depend on financially enfranchising worst-off debtors.