Lome Togo?

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My name is Nku Edward from Lome Togo west Africa. I am the Personal
account officer to Late client Who used to work with a manufacturing
company here in Lome Togo before his sudden death. On the 21st of April
2003, My client, his wife and their only son was involved in a fatal
motor accident along Oakland's Roads, Han well London and
unfortunately, They all lost their lives in the event of the accident,
Since then I have made several enquiries to your embassy to locate any
of my clients extended relatives and this has also proved unsuccessful.
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I just received my first SNAD phish, from .ru. I'd guess that
these are not sent to random internet users like the bank
phish (I get those for banks I've never heard of), but only to
active sellers. They sent it to an email account I use in
AMOE, which I don't use for auctions. Consider yourselves
warned, if you expose an address here.

The aggrieved eBay user ID is real (but not one that's ever
been on one of my auctions).

The item number (7392311562) is real, but not mine. This
item itself looks like a scam, as it not only invites WU
payments, there's a link to WU in the Description. Hello,
eBay Safe Payments robots?

Having never had a SNAD, I can't say if the page format and
content is authentic-looking, indeed, I didn't actually render
it, as I have a secure method of viewing just the raw coding.
These things likely contain attempted web bugs, etc.

SNAD - Substantially Not As Described.

--
Regards, Bob Niland                        mailto:n...@ispname.tld
http://www.access-one.com/rjn           email4rjn AT yahoo DOT com
NOT speaking for any employer, client or Internet Service Provider.

Since the SNAD phishers linked to a real recent auction
that offered WU as a payment method, I got to wondering
just how lax eBay was at enforcing the Safe Payments
policy, now some 3 months old.

Restricting Advanced Search to US items only ...

1,252,051 listings include the string "Western Union"
          Only a handful of them are for recordings
          by a music group of that name.

   15,804 listings include the URL "www.westernunion.com"

3,545,803 listings still show "BidPay" as a payment method

Finding this stuff is hardly rocket science. Popping an
advisory when people upload the listings wouldn't be
hard either - or at least auto-send an email notice.

Would eBay take a material income hit if they downed all
these listings? Yup. But that's little excuse, and taking
no action (apparently) is an open invitation for the
whiners to contain complaining that eBay is a cesspool
of scams and frauds.

Attention SAEP. You have your assignment. Get busy.
I expect these 5 million listings to be gone by morning :-)

SAEP - Self-Appointed eBay Police.

--
Regards, Bob Niland                        mailto:n...@ispname.tld
http://www.access-one.com/rjn           email4rjn AT yahoo DOT com
NOT speaking for any employer, client or Internet Service Provider.

On 2 Apr 2006 08:49:05 -0700, "rjn" <email4...@yahoo.com> wrote:

I've got someone who bought an eBay store item simply =begging= me to
take Western Union as a payment. Legitimate businesses take WU
payments all the time. Any form of payment can be abused.

BFD. I've probably got a dozen or so up myself - relists with
descriptions written a year or more back where I didn't bother to go
edit it out. Why should I?  It's not like anyone can use it, anyway.

Attempted "hard" enforcement of what is basically a stupid policy the
only real purpose of which is to plump up a business partnet would be
stupid anyway.

I'd be pissed off if they took mine down, I've never scammed anybody
in my life.

So take it. The eBay SP policy doesn't prohibit taking it,
just advertising or soliticing it.

Well, BP may be back soon, but that's not the point.

Has eBay even sent you any friendly emails suggesting
that you might want to re-word these listing in the future?
Didn't think so.

The point is that eBay has yet-another-serious-we-really-
mean-it-this-time policy that they are obviously not
enforcing. This encourages the perception that these
policies are shams, whose main purpose is to protect
eBay and not the customers.

My guess is that eBay took a shot at enforcement in January,
and quickly got the riot act read to them by PowerSellers.
It may now be that they only use it as support for takedowns
when a user complaint points out that a listing has a link to
www.scampay.con

--
Regards, Bob Niland                        mailto:n...@ispname.tld
http://www.access-one.com/rjn           email4rjn AT yahoo DOT com
NOT speaking for any employer, client or Internet Service Provider.