Identity Theft and Online Auctions

By B.E. Conrad

There have been many types of businesses to arise in the past decades which simply could not have existed if it had not been for the invention of the internet. The internet has made a great many excellent business models possible, including of course the online auction. Many of us have used the power of online auction sites such as eBay to clean out our closets, make some extra money and even run our own businesses.

While these online auctions are excellent businesses, the money they have attracted has also attracted its share of criminals and others intent on ripping off the public at large. In some cases these criminals set up bogus accounts and sell goods they never intend to ship. In other cases these criminals send out emails to members of the online auction community in an attempt to scare them into divulging their vital personal information.

The process of sending out these unsolicited emails which claim to be from the auction is known as phishing, and online auction houses have been a target of phishing schemes ever since these schemes first hit the internet.

Unfortunately for customers of these online auction companies, the level of sophistication used by these schemes has grown by leaps and bounds, and it is more difficult than ever before to tell the real emails from the attempts at phishing.

When victims open these emails, they are often warned that their account at the online auction house will be cancelled if they do not respond to the email and verify certain personal information. Included in the email will be an embedded link which appears to point to the website of the auction company.

In fact, however, the website instead is owned and operated by the scam artists themselves, and when those internet users enter their personal information, such as their username, password, credit card number and so on, each keystroke is captured and sent off to the scam artists who initiated the email.

The information captured, in turn is then used by identity thieves and other criminals to open new accounts, get new credit cards, take out loans and otherwise wreak financial havoc on the individual who has been victimized.

One of the worst things about this type of identity theft is that it often goes undetected by the victim until much of the damage has been done. It can be difficult to detect identity theft at the beginning, and it can also be difficult to recover from identity theft after it has take place.

It is therefore important to avoid becoming a victim in the first place, and one of the best ways to do that is to simply verify the authenticity of any emails that purport to originate with your favorite online auction company. Most of the largest online auction companies have established a special email address to which suspicious emails can be forwarded, making it much easier to determine if a particular email is legitimate or not. Avoiding identity theft in the first place is vastly preferable to trying to recover from it, no matter what the source of the problem.

© Doityourself.com 2006