How to Prevent Identity Theft

A while back I received a seemingly legitimate email from Ebay bay, offering me some great scheme or other, I just needed to log in and let them have the details necessary to set up this new ‘all bells and whistles’ account.

I was fairly new to Ebay at that point but the Ad sounded very enticing so I did as requested and entered my user name and password. That was my first error. The criminals now had access to be Ebay account! Ebay NEVER ask you to log in via emails they send. They also advise you to go separately to your Ebay account, log in and then access their message that way to ensure it is genuinely from them and not generated fraudulently as was mine.

Next the site asked me for a lot of personal information including credit card details. At that point I ran out of patience and time and so did not proceed. Had I done so I would have lost a lot more than my Ebay account!

I thought no more of this matter till a few days later when Ebay suspended my account due to some ‘unusual activity’. It seemed the criminals had been using my account for illegal transactions. I explained what had happened to Ebay and my account was re-opened. I had a few ‘suspicious’ clients but other than that the damage was minimal.

I have since had numerous emails like this from fraudulent sites mimicking AOL, Ebay and others asking for log in, account details etc.

I now know though when these are fraudulent emails as they only seem to come to an email address that I made public. The email address I actually registered for these things has never been published on the web.