While I’m not too sure if this was a phishing attempt or not, Chris and I got a letter in the mail a little while ago that wanted a bit of information from him; a credit card number and more contact information (how much more information could they need if they already had our address?). The reason that the company wanted the information was to give him a “claim” on a lawsuit that he never filed (or to his knowledge) was ever a part of. The whole thing seemed a bit scammy even if the letter looked like it was from a legitimate company.

So I began looking a little more into the letter and the senders. The people who sent the letter (whoever they are) are not at the address that is listed on the letter. Even the law firm that says created, filed, and tried the lawsuit was not the actual law firm that is the legitimate law firm for the suit.

So, if this is a phishing scam, do they not realize that people have Google? I mean, when my friends or I don’t know the answer to something our first response is “I’ll Google it.”

These days people are not simply going to give up their credit card information, social security numbers, bank account information, etc. to someone who just sent a letter to their house. Even if, it looks more legitimate when its sent through the USPS rather than Gmail.

I suppose the moral of the story is to always check to make sure that, before you send off your information to a company that may or may not be who they say, check! You never know whether that is an actual company or a poser.

I am really glad that I looked up that information, but I was thinking, “Who do I report this to?” Chris asked me the same question and the only thing I could think of “Well, this doesn’t have a ‘report phishing’ like email does.” So, who do you report phishing attempts through the mail to?

Well, it appears as though Chris’s eBay issue has been resolved…after only 7 weeks of not being able to log into his account.

So, what did it take to finally get into the account? It appears as though the secret was to call eBay and tell them that he wanted to cancel the account. Last week he came to the decision to sell everything on my account and that he should just go ahead and cancel his.

He started listing things on my eBay account on Monday. He called Monday afternoon and told them to cancel his account. At that time they told him that he had 180 days to change his mind. Today, Wednesday, Chris tried to log into my account and typed in his username and password by mistake…he was able to finally log in.

As strange as it is, everything is working fine now. Other than having a nearly two month old backlog of feedback to leave and messages to respond to.

Of course, the first thing he did was update his credit card information to try to make sure that something like that doesn’t happen again, or at least to reduce the chances of something like that happening again.

Update: Chris is on the phone right now with eBay and it turns out that no one ever actually put a note on his account to cancel the account. There is some strange kind of breakdown in communication over at eBay.

I don’t understand how eBay customer service is supposed to correct anything if they don’t talk to each other, or at least leave little notes on the accounts of users to let other customer support people know what the issue is with the customer.

Gah.

While I’m not too sure if this was a phishing attempt or not, Chris and I got a letter in the mail today that asked for some credit card information for a claim on a lawsuit that we never made. First, Chris said that it was a bit gimmecky, but the letter looked legit.

So I started looking a little into it. The people who sent the letter (whoever they are) are not at the address that is listed on the letter. Even the law firm that says created, filed, and tried the lawsuit was not the actual law firm that is the legitimate law firm for the suit.

So, if this is a phishing scam, do they not realize that people have Google? I mean, when my friends or I don’t know the answer to something our first response is “I’ll Google it.”

These days people are not simply going to give up their credit card information, social security numbers, bank account information, etc. to someone who just sent a letter to their house. Even if, it looks more legitimate when its sent through the USPS rather than Gmail.

I suppose the moral of the story is to always check to make sure that, before you send off your information to a company that may or may not be who they say, check! You never know whether that is an actual company or a poser.

I am really glad that I looked up that information, but I was thinking, “Who do I report this to?” Chris asked me the same question and the only thing I could think of “Well, this doesn’t have a ‘report phishing’ like email does.” So, who do you report phishing attempts through the mail to?

Today’s big news is that Ebay will be selling off a huge portion of Skype, but in my house we can’t log in to the website due to a “closer alignment between Ebay and Half.com.”

What is happening is that when Chris attempts to log into his Ebay account, he gets a message saying that he needs to enter in his credit card information before he can continue. The next page is hosted on an old credit card processing server for Ebay and it (at least at one point in time) is legit. After he enters in his information he gets an error message that says, “Sorry, we cannot process your request at this time, please try again later.” This is on a page that is full of broken images.

After that it sends him back to Ebay’s homepage, and he’s still not logged in.

Every time one of us calls Ebay they give us the run around, won’t let us talk to a technical support person, and also tries to play it off like we have a virus on our computers. I know that all customer support people are trained to assume that most customers are computer illiterate and have downloaded 44 viruses on their computers and don’t know how to clear their cache, but I suppose we’re the exception. We have three computers and are completely unable to log in to Chris’s account due to the Half.com error.

So, here we are, we’ve spoken to three different people at Ebay: One on the online chat and two on the phone. The situation has yet to resolve itself so we started looking at online forums to see what other people are doing and there are people out there who haven’t been able to log into their Ebay accounts for months due to this error.

I suppose if it came down to it, Chris could sell on my Ebay account, but he has spent the last two years building up his feedback and credibility on his account and now he has regular customers.

This post may sound a bit scatterbrained, but we’re both pretty fed up with the entire situation and are starting to consider selling on Amazon and other internet sites to just try to stop this problem from happening again. Ebay (and PayPal) have been nothing but a headache for the past month anyway. After a package was lost in the mail and the customer didn’t pay for insurance on it, PayPal decided that (even though we had plenty of proof that the item was shipped and the Post Office will back up this claim) it would be holding onto the money until the package was delivered. Over 2 months later, the package was delivered and we got the money, but we really couldn’t figure out what is the point of offering insurance.