Bill Myers - September 2, 2008

I almost got taken in by an expensive scam this week. Something that could have cost me thousands of dollars.

See, I buy a lot of things through eBay auctions. Everything from office supplies to cars.

And for the most part, I rarely have problems when bidding or buying on eBay. I take care to read the item descriptions, only bid from sellers with good feedback scores, and avoid the 'too good to be true' auctions.

But yesterday, I came within seconds of becoming a crime victim.

I found an eBay item I wanted to bid on, clicked the 'bid' button, and was prepared to enter my eBay password to complete the bid.

But my password retrieval program (RoboForm), wasn't able to find my eBay password - which is very unusual since it has always found it before.

I looked closely at the auction listing and discovered that the seller had included a javascript which caused the auction page to instantly jump to a fake eBay page - designed to trick me into giving up my eBay and PayPal passwords.

Had I entered my passwords on that fake page, I would have given the seller all he needed to break into my eBay and PayPal account, where he could have depleted my PayPal funds, and run fake auctions under my name.

The only thing that saved me was my reliance on a password retrieval program which recognizes whether a page is valid for the stored passwords. That program saw the scam, and kept me out of trouble.

If you are not already using a secure password retrieval program, you might want to. The one I use is the free Roboform program, which can be found at http://www.roboform.com/