Who is "Gucas"

No doubt many of us are sick and tired of receiving spoof emails from Gucas (fig 1) about wanting to buy an item when they don't have anything for sale or asking if they have Paypal when it's apparent on their listing.

Spoof emails can be a major problem for unsuspecting Ebayers. These emails ask Ebayers to reply by clicking on links asking for their personal information, such as their user name and password (figs 7, 3, 5 & 6). Generally, once you click on a link a keystroke program is activated and the hacker can record your keystrokes thereby obtaining your Ebay username and password.

I don't think Gucas is very smart. Firstly, if I were going to send spam to an Ebayer purely to obtain their username and password, I certainly wouldn't "CC" other Ebayers into my spoof email (fig 4). Secondly I have noticed that Gucas is a very poor speller. I have actually hit the reply button once and told him so however it seems his learning curves look like Mount Everest.

Gucas seems to be becoming more creative lately by dropping the "F" word in his emails (fig 2 creatively blurred out so as not to offend fellow Bloggers). After receiving four of these emails in one day I was starting to get offended so I forwarded the email to the Ebay fraud email address "spoof@ebay.com".

"My Messages" is the legitimate source for any email from EBay that affects your account. If an email is legitimate, it's always in My Messages. If you get an email that looks like it's from EBay about a problem with your account, a query on an Ebay listing or requests personal information and it's not in My Messages, its spoof!

Spoof email most likely includes a forged email address in the "From" line. Some may actually be real Ebay email addresses that have been forged. In the instance above (fig 4), Gucas has used a fake user email address to make his email look as if it has come from a legitimate Ebayer.

By following the safety measures above and those on the Ebay website, we can eradicate worms like Gucas as an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

For more safe trading tips visit: http://pages.ebay.com.au/help/confidence/overview.html