Anatomy of Online Fraud: How Thieves Targeted eBay Users but Got Stopped Instead

Matt Curtin
June 20, 2003

Abstract

At 10 p.m. on Saturday, June 14, 2003, I received a call from a client. His wife had just received email that claimed to be from eBay, asking her to enter her credit card number. By 11 p.m., I had reports to the Internet service providers whose systems had been used to originate the message and to impersonate the eBay web site, as well as to FBI in Washington, D.C.

Here we discuss the fraud in detail, showing how it was constructed, how it was stopped, and what consumers can do to protect themselves against these kinds of attacks.

The report is available in PDF and HTML.