About ten days ago, I got a flood of e-mails from eBay about my items’ auctions closing soon. I figured it was another scam and pretty much ignored it. Later that day, I logged into eBay to satisfy that nagging voice in the back of my head that said I should just check. Wouldn’t you know that someone had figured out my password and hacked my eBay account. They were selling couture tracksuits from my account. Only one item had sold and someone had bought a $50 tracksuit with $30 shipping. I smelled a scam.
The first thing I did was notify eBay via their safe harbor, changed my password, and then informed the buyer that my account had been hacked and that they would need to contact PayPal to figure this out. I neglected to mention that nobody in their right mind would pay $30 for shipping on a $50 piece of clothing. Oh, I certainly smelled a scam. The next thing I did was change my PayPal password, just to be safe.
Next, I de-listed the items and realized that I also owed eBay $80 for listing charges. That didn’t worry me quite so much because they would reverse those charges once they investigated the situation.
Today, I got a message from eBay telling me that they indeed detected that someone had hacked my account and that had resolved everything.
Now, I’m going to all kinds of sites and changing my internet passwords.
I should have protected myself better by not using the same password all over the place. Here is my new rule: one password for work (changes every 90 days), one password for financial transactions, one site for online shopping sites, and one for porn recreational sites.