Won an item on ebay.
In contact with the seller on the phone, payment etc all sorted.

In the meantime. Got a scam email outside of ebay saying blah blah xyz.

Now, they could easily have got all the info’ off ebay, but how did they get my email address? That’s the bit I cannot work out.

Any ideas?
SB

Well, not entirely sure what you are saying there. More info?

OK, try again…

I won an item on ebay. Contacted the seller to arrange payment. So me and the seller both know what we’re doing.

A little while later i get an email from someone saying that they can’t take payment via paypal, and I should write back to them for details on how to pay (this didn’t fit with the arrangement I had with the seller, and whoever sent the email didn’t use the sellers name to sign off). The email was not through the ebay messaging system. It had the details of the item i’d won, plus the whereabout of the seller etc. All info’ that could have been sourced if they had been watching the item. But the bit they couldn’t have got from the item was my email address. I can’t figure out how they got that.

Ebay warns against contact outside of ebay regarding items. But how do they get your email address?

SB

they dont have your email address, they just sent you an email through ebay using your username, having said that dont trust it and if you are suspicious report it, remember ‘if its too good to be true then it probably is’

Contact the seller through ebay’s message system explaining whats happened.See if its him/her who sent you the message.If all of a sudden he wont take paypal I’d walk away.

epo-aholic – they do have my email address. that’s the point of my post. How did they get it?

taxi25 – It’s all done and dusted. He’s been paid, through paypal, I got the product, both left good feedback for each other. Just trying to figure out how it was so easy for the scammer to get my email address.

There are a couple of ways they can get it.

The easiest is directly from eBay using the member information request (found under Community, last time I looked). eBay are supposed to only release this info to trading members but they rarely bother to check.

The 2nd is using the site ‘spoofbay’ which can be really useful for checking out people you’re thinking of dealing with but can also give out a LOT of information that you might not want out there.

The eBay data handling procedure is an absolute joke. I avoid it these days.