There are so many crooks out there trying to get our personal information that you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a couple of them. A couple weeks ago I was on a business trip to a military convention in Las Vegas. The first night there, my wife wanted to check her e-mail so I signed up for the hotel's wireless service. when she was done, I logged onto eBay to check a couple items I was watching. The next afternoon, I signed onto my AOL account and fount over 200 e-mails waiting for me. Since I usually get
10-15 e-mails per day, this caught my attention immediately and I opened a couple of them. they were all e-mails from eBay confirming newly-posted items for sale by me. since I hadn't listed 200 items, and, in fact had listed nothing for sale in almost a year, I opened eBay and tried to sign in. I found the password I'd been using for almost a year would not work and I could not sign in - kept telling me the password was incorrect.
The only way I could contact eBay was to e-mail them at their spoof address so I notified them that someone had hijacked my account and listed some 200 items for sale. eBay sent back a polite canned e-mail indicating that, since the e-mail did not deal with an attempted spoof or pfishing attempt, they could not act on it and suggested I sign in and go to the eBay My Account section to change my password. I sent them another e-mail reiterating that, since my account was hijacked, I can no longer access my account in any way. they sent me another e-mail, again telling me to sign in and go to my account. Luckily, I remembered that a friend had found a number to call eBay directly and I called him and got it. After reaching the eBay voice mail (couldn't reach a human), I left a message indicating the problem and, apparently they got because that evening, all the auctions were cancelled and that the bids the phony me placed on five other auctions were also cancelled.
It took me until I got back home to finally reach a living person at eBay. Once I did, that person was quite courteous and quickly walked me through the steps to restore the account. However, it highlights the difficulty in reaching a live person at eBay and their propensity for answering e-mail inquiries with canned responses that may or may not address the subject of your inquiry.