ok finally back!

was away on a 10-day trip to the east coast. came back and had to take care of some things ... hence the delay in blogging. yeah missed you guys :)

so here is a story of my friend who shockingly lost $700 while doing a transcation on eBay. my friend wanted to sell a laptop that he recently purchased. he listed it in eBay for a selling price of $700. if you don't know, eBay doesn't handle financial transactions. it only facilitates the auctioning part. individuals usually have a pay-pal account for money transfer. and so did my friend. when someone buys your item, you get a notification about the sale (mind you, still its not completely over). then its upto you to verify if the money has been credited into ur account and then ship the product. ok, now u have got ur 101 on eBay.

someone bought my friends laptop and promptly he gets a notification. the interesting thing is he even got an email from Pay-Pal telling him that $700 was credited to his acct. the email had a link to his acct. he clicked it, was taken to his Pay-Pal page, and there he saw the $700 sitting in his acct. being satisfied, he ships the item, thru the buyer's fed-ex acct, which would ship the product to florida. 2 days later, my friend logs into his Pay-Pal acct (not thru the link on the email), and to his shock he discovers that there had been absolutely no transaction.

how did this happen. well, the Pay-Pal mail was a spoof. the cheater (not a hacker) actually bought the item from eBay, and never credited the money. instead he sent the spoof mail. the link in it took him to his own site, which conveniently accepted any password my friend typed and showed him a page which looked like a normal Pay-Pal acct page. and the fed-ex shipment was later changed to a destination in Nigeria.

very bold indeed. my friend could have checked the addr bar on the website (looking at which u can easily say that its a phony site), but he never did and ended up losing his laptop worth $700.

long post, just wanted to let u guys know about this.