I get spoofed emails all the time from scammers that are on phishing expeditions. I forward the ebay emails to spoof@ebay.com, and the PayPal emails to spoof@paypal.com. I occasionally get spoofed emails appearing to be from Amazon.com, but I don’t think they have an address to forward them to. Or if they do, I don’t know it…and I have looked for one.
I have forwarded dozens of emails to both eBay and PayPal. I always get back a form email from them saying that they looked at the email, and it wasn’t sent from them. They annoyingly go on to describe what a spoofed email is. If I didn’t already know what a spoof email was, why would I have forwarded it to the spoof@ email address? Duh!
What happens with the emails? They say they forward them to the appropriate authorities. Do they shut the web sites? Has anyone been prosecuted? Or am I just wasting my time forwarding these things? Is this only thing that happens is I get a form email back?
The wife of a friend of mine got caught by a phishing email appearing to be by eBay. Her password was immediatly changed, and bunch of high end merchandise was suddenly for auction under her ID including ATVs. She had to jump through a bunch of hoops, but managed to get control of her account again.
These phishing scammers needed to be hunted down and beaten with a baseball bat.
The email address for Amazon is stop-spoofing@amazon.com. I’ve been selling books, CDs, DVDs, and more on Amazon since 2004 and have received several spoof emails, all of which get forwarded immediately to the appropriate people. I think they each follow up on them, at least I hope they do, but I don’t know of any actual cases where phishers have been prosecuted. Still, I would rather take action than idly sit by. Who knows, maybe the email that one eof us forwards could be the one that puts the phishers in jail. Thanks for doing your part to help combat this growing problem.
Comment by Dave — January 30, 2006 @ 10:04 pm