Yesterday I got a phishing scam in my mailbox, purporting to be from Ebay, and requesting me to confirm my cardnumber. Apart from the obvious scam alert that was immediately ringing in my ears on reading "confirm" and "card number", I've never even used Ebay (yes, I'm one of those people).
Nice as I try to be, though, I generally make a quick attempt at forwarding the mails to whichever company they pretend to be, to help them get it stopped. So in Ebay's case I tried forwarding it to [email protected], assuming that was a reasonable choice. Not being directly affected to this, I wasn't
Apparently so must other people, because they have an autoresponder there. However I was less than pleased with the response:
REPORTING SPOOFIf you received this message after attempting to report an email that
appears to have come from eBay but actually directs you to another
site,
you must forward the message to us again by using the forward function
of your email program. Make certain that [email protected] is in the "to"
field. Do not alter the subject line, add text to your message or
forward the email as an attachment.
Now, I can understand that they have a preferred address to receive this to, but they are already receiving mail to [email protected], and I'd think phishing scams would be one of the best candidates for an address like that.
They're also telling me not to alter the subject line, add text to the message or forward it as an attachment, all of which will require me to change settings on my mail program to forward this to them, this before a human has looked at the damn message I sent
If I were to spend time doing this for all the junk I receive, I'd never be doing anything else. I'm happy to forward a message to them. I'm not happy to do it twice and jump through hoops to warn them about something that doesn't affect me in the least.
Looking at Ebay's homepage, there is a link to their "security center" as the only obvious alternative. However, going through that link brings you to multiple choice hell, after which you're kindly prompted to log in or register. I'm not going through their security links because I want to be an Ebay user - I'm going through it to report a fraud problem.
So from now on, whenever I receive a mail claiming to be from Ebay, I'll click the "spam" button in my mail client and hopefully it will soon be trained to give Ebay the same automated treatment they gave me.