Online tools service GoofBay have issued an email statement regarding concerns that their free auction sniping service appeared to be causing users eBay accounts to become compromised.

In the announcement by email, the GoofBay team state -

We have received many messages from our Goofbay community about an email received from eBay informing them that their account has been compromised/hijacked and items listed on their account.

Goofbay has confirmed that this is not the case and was caused by an issue external to Goofbay. Your eBay account has not been comprised/hijacked and this issue has affected many other sniper services including Goofbay. At no time was any Goofbay user or eBay users account at risk.

This email was a generic email triggered by an advanced security system within eBay. eBay are planning to send out an email to all users who received the erroneous email confirming to them that their accounts were not compromised/hijacked.

Goofbay has worked alongside eBay to identify and resolve this issue and are pleased to announce that there was no security breach, no accounts were comprised/hijacked and your Goofbay and eBay account details were not (and are not) at risk.

This is the first I have heard of this round of concerns regarding sniping software, and erroneous security actions.  Does anyone have further data?

I vaguely recall that sometime last year (maybe the year before), there was a scare over allegations and intimations that eBay were going to ban the use of sniping software, and there was at least one lengthy worry-thread kicked up on the eBay UK PowerSeller forum.  As I no longer have access to that (sales, on eBay, have been so abysmal that I’ve lost that status), if any readers are able to locate that thread and provide relevant quotes, I’d appreciate them adding those to the comments below.

GoofBay’s email does raise the query as to whether or not such widespread security scares (regarding third-party services) are going to become more frequent – remember the Auctiva issue last month – and whether or not malware creators and direct-hackers have redirected focus from directly attacking eBay, to coming at them from partner developers.

Ed