On Apr 14, 2013, at 9:20 PM, Jim Stephens <jws at jwsss.com> wrote:
On 4/14/2013 5:30 PM, mc68010 wrote:
> On 4/14/2013 5:12 PM, William Donzelli wrote:
>>> Someone *must* have cracked the
>>> ebay database...
THey can contact me if they can guess my ebay id. but
it is worlds away from anything i use for email. I think MIke's point was it was an
ebay looking approach @ his email address. I get my email from ebay thru a distantly
related oddball server and then respond thru ebay messages. Unless i reply thru there or
send my email address by replying to a message from my main email I will never get email
there that is legit.
The other way to discover ID's by the way which I'm using is to watch feedback to
sellers who don't like. BUt that still only gives an ebay ID unless you happen to
associate your ebay ID with an email address somewhere.
It is indeed relatively easy to find people's eBay IDs with some patience, since the
obscured ID still contains two accurate letters (in reverse order, I believe, at least in
all the cases I've found) but an accurate feedback number (which changes, so the delta
can also be checked over time), so looking through feedback for likely buyers/sellers who
might have interacted with them for matching feedback numbers often can un-obscure the
eBay ID. I did that for a while trying to help someone track down where some stuff from
an auctioned storage space went, and just for curiosity to see who keeps winning against
me.
Seems to me that one can avoid even potential scam second chance offers by just going
through the eBay web interface. That won't protect against shill bidding, but would
filter out spoofed emails. I pretty much never interact with eBay emails I get except to
file them away, I just go to the web interface to deal with whatever it was.
-Paul