Despite everything that eBay UK Trust & Safety markets about links in emails, PayPal UK sent me a marketing email last night offering several tantalising buttons to click.

The one that caught my eye was the teasing tagline of -

You list on eBay and we’ll pay your fees

PayPal is offering six lucky eBay sellers the chance to have their combined eBay and PayPal fees paid for them. For a year!

Having thoroughly checked the mail header to ensure it was from PayPal, I clicked through and was given the following explanation -

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Hot on the heels of yesterday’s pro-active marketing report about eBay’s would-be competitor, eBid, it seems all is not well in the eBid technology farm.

Reports from a South East Asia based, long-time eBid user reveals that all of the eBid country-sites, and it’s sister online payment service ppPay, are displaying the dreaded http 403 Access Forbidden page to users in the region. (No, this is not linked to the TameBay Forbidden Access issue reported a week ago in our Sunday Papers post).

Delayed responses from eBid support report that both eBid and ppPay have been suffering ongoing Denial of Service attacks, and that South East Asia is one of the regions that will remain locked out until the situation is resolved.

Yet, communication from active UK and US based eBid users report nothing untoward in the site’s performance, which appears to contradict the claims of eBid Customer Support regarding the denial of service attack - if it happened, then it would normally affect all users equally, and none of the users I contacted are reporting seeing anything of this nature in the last few months. The eBid community forums also have nothing about it in the announcements board, or in the “bugs & glitches” board, which is where you would expect such reports to surface.

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Having been on the road for a week, and finally getting to my mailbox today, I was perturbed to spot several PayPal-style phishing emails claiming I had received large Euro deposits to my MoneyBookers account.

The emails are very authentic-looking, and almost had me fooled.  Checking the mail headers immediately revealed them as fake however.  They all came from a PacBell.com email address (a USA ISP) instead of from MoneyBookers.com

Watch out for them if you have a MoneyBookers account - as I said, they look identical to the mails received from the genuine source.  Remember the number one rule regarding ANY email from a financial service provider -

• NEVER click the link in the email
• ALWAYS open a new browser window and type the address of the payment provider and log in directly

Worryingly, forwarding the phishing mails to spoof@moneybookers.com resulted in a bounced email with an http 5.x.x error advising they don’t accept direct emails and all communication must be through the contact page inside the site.  This represents a cavalier attitude to fraud prevention and prosecution in my estimation.

Because I’m on the road, I don’t have time to follow this up right now, but I will do so when I get back.

Ed

A great many of those jumping ship from eBay, due to this year’s policy & fee changes, are looking to Amazon as an alternative channel for selling their goods.  But, not everyone is able to sell on the “Big River”, and not all inventory leaving eBay is acceptable either.

It’s fairly widely known that Amazon throw seasonal restrictions on what they call 3rd party vendors (i.e. independant sellers) in categories such as Jewellery and Toys and Games.  What’s probably less well known is their market protection for domestic sellers.

I’ve heard from one of our members that he has been told categorically, that he cannot sell on Amazon due to his location - if I said he’s in the Orient, you can probably guess who immediately - despite being able to fulfill all of Amazon Payments criteria for the UK, and despite having had an Amazon Payments account for four years already.  This is the message he got from Amazon UK Seller Support -

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