Fun with Ebay

Shiolar · Post by **Shiolar** » Thu Apr 27, 2006 4:33 pm

A word of advice, all. If you don't have a ridiculously long password with both numbers and letters, go create one now.

Apparently, I'm the proud new owner of two rally cars at a combined value of approximately US $14000.

I think I'm gonna go have a little talk with Ebay now.

LakotaWolf · Post by **LakotaWolf** » Thu Apr 27, 2006 4:49 pm

Congrats? :/

If it was someone else logging into your account and bidding on things, then yeah, you should have no problem getting those reversed. Good luck!

Post by **Dray** » Thu Apr 27, 2006 5:10 pm

Holy crap. x.x''' I hope that you can get that worked out quickly and efficiently!

Shard · Post by **Shard** » Thu Apr 27, 2006 6:56 pm

lol - wow that's pretty amazing.... I'll have to remember to have something complicated, I'm going to be using some ebay soon....

Omniwite · Post by **Omniwite** » Thu Apr 27, 2006 8:23 pm

O.o;;; Ouch... I'm sorry to hear that. I hope you can get that reversed!

Shiolar · Post by **Shiolar** » Fri Apr 28, 2006 1:25 am

Getting the bids reversed is easy... It's the fact that the guy won two auctions and now I have guys asking where I'd like my new cars delivered...

Anyway, I happened to get lucky in that the guy may have bought two cars with my account, but he can't pay for them. I bet he was really disappointed to discover that my Paypal account is under a different email address and password.

I don't think Ebay have any of my financial details, but I might give Barclaycard a call just in case and get a new card issued... Just to be safe. And then develop a new system for my passwords this weekend. Just to be safe.

*sighs* This isn't really much of a problem, really. I shouldn't really be surprised about this. It's just been one of those weeks. Apparently, I'm not meant to be getting any sleep this week...

Shiolar · Post by **Shiolar** » Sat Apr 29, 2006 4:32 am

And it's sorted, at least on Ebay's end of things. I had to go through their LiveChat support section to actually get to talk to a human being, but once a human being was located, it all went rather smoothly.

Apparently, though, I can now contact the police if I want to, and Ebay will give them the details they recorded. So I'm gonna ask a mate who's a policeman if such a thing would be taken seriously on their end.

And if it is, I'm gonna press charges, and once it's been recognised as a criminal offence, I'm gonna talk to my lawyer and see if I can get more money out of the guy than it would cost me to actually go through civil court proceedings. It'll just be a nice bonus if the guy ends up in jail or something.

Broadly speaking, I don't take legal actions against hackers and password crackers, and broadly speaking, I don't sue people. But when it starts involving real money, it's personal. It's not a game anymore, all bets are off, and the guy WILL go down if I can possibly arrange it.

And now I'm probably gonna get yelled at for being vindictive...

Mystic Dragon · Post by **Mystic Dragon** » Sat Apr 29, 2006 8:24 am

Woo! Go Shiolar! I'm so glad you're willing to put that punk in his place. :3 Too often people think they're invicible cause they can just hid behind a computer screen. It's annoying as hell. If you do end up pressing charges, keep us informed.

Shard · Post by **Shard** » Sat Apr 29, 2006 11:58 am

Hey it would normally qualify here as 'grand larceny' I think, anything above 1k $ is grand theft. They attempted to get a huge amount of money from YOU to essentially steal two CARS from someone else! That's pretty much not a hack crime, that's attempted grand theft.

Real money definitely = real crime. I hope he enjoys his stay in the slammer.

Shiolar · Post by **Shiolar** » Sat Apr 29, 2006 12:08 pm

Oooh, I never actually considered that aspect of it, Shard. I'll definitely bring that up with the policeman I'm gonna talk to next week. It does put it all in the different perspective when you call it attempted grand theft rather than hacking...

I've heard that the police over here don't always take hack crimes seriously; rumour only though, because I've never heard of anyone who's ever actually reported one. Probably just a case of people never saying anything because they don't think they'll be taken seriously, even though that's possibly not the case at all?

Still, I'm definitely gonna be more careful in the future. I devised a whole new system of generating my passwords today. The scary thing is I can actually remember them. Good, but scary...

Shiolar · Post by **Shiolar** » Tue May 02, 2006 11:56 am

This is me being calm. As opposed to the near inarticulate rage that is probably more justified for this particular situation.

The police would take this seriously, insofar as a crime is concerned, but they can't do anything about it because no money actually got stolen.

The reason they can't is because, get this, they need the evidence from the guy's ISP (IP addresses, usernames, name, address, etc), but ISPs charge the police money to have access to those records. They'll happily give out all your details to a third party who'll bombard you in advertisements, but they won't give it to the police.

Imagine if anybody else tried that. If you saw a crime happen, and the police asked you to give your evidence, and you said "Only if you pay me" what do you reckon would happen? Can anybody say "Perverting the course of justice"? But no, it's okay for the ISPs to do that. Money means more to them than justice, apparently.

And the bureaucrats who authorise police funding won't allow them to pay the ISPs to track down someone who didn't actually succeed in getting any money. So yeah, the police take internet crimes seriously, but the people they have to deal with, the ISPs and the bureaucrats in charge of them, don't.

So, I am displeased, to say the least. It makes me feel so valued as a citizen of this country. That they won't authorise the police to actually do anything about the people that commit crimes against me and other decent, hardworking taxpayers.

Shard · Post by **Shard** » Tue May 02, 2006 12:29 pm

Wow - that's pretty surprising. You are in the uk aren't you? Here in USA it's all the ISPs can do to *stop* police from getting records. (Up to and including Google's refusal to hand over records to the government without a proper warrant - good for them, I'm gonna invest in their stock for that.)

I'm disappointed for you. That's really a ridiculous turn of events.

Maybe you should suggest (I don't know how) to the police and organizations controlling it, that they set up dummy accounts for buying isp info....

Shiolar · Post by **Shiolar** » Tue May 02, 2006 12:43 pm

Yeah, I'm in the UK. I think ultimately the problem is because of Data Protection,the Human Rights Act, and political correctness, which means the police can't just take what they want, and the ISPs being greedy and knowing they can get away with it.

So... I have to let it go, because nobody can actually do anything about it. It's so unbelievably frustrating.

Shard · Post by **Shard** » Tue May 02, 2006 1:50 pm

Well, at the very least, "now we know". And, they didn't *get* your money - which is better than nothin.

Shiolar · Post by **Shiolar** » Tue May 02, 2006 1:58 pm

Yeah, so I may as well relax and forget it. Which means I can get some sleep now, at least. Heh. And, on the plus side, I have a lovely new password system which... one could describe it as nearly unbreakable, but you could also describe it as overkill... Oh well.