A public service announcement

Originally, I was going to write about specific goods and services for those seeking homes in Cary NC Real Estate (don'tcha just love how I snuck it in there) when I was going through the "Weird Stuff" section of eBay.

At the top of the list, there are very sexually explicit images that would probably violate the Terms of Service through eBay. And, for the sake of the readership who may find the material offensive and for the interest of keeping all content on this blog at or around a PG to PG13 level, the images are obscured (plus, the people I write for probably wouldn't appreciate it too much).

And, of course, in the interest of knowledge and research, it was very necessary for me to click on them. Really. It was. Honest.

With current fraud issues with ATM and credit cards, there is an increased focus on maintaining personal security, such as making sure that your PIN number is hidden, but this is something else.

Upon clicking on the auction in question (again, in the interest of research), I was sent to a login screen, where I was asked for my login and password. As I was not specifically looking to BUY anything on eBay, I didn't. But for some odd reason, clicking on the back button kept sending me back to that page.

Then I paused for a moment and this popped up.
With the immediate appearance of an authentic eBay login screen, it's quite easy to be fooled into trusting this, and then submitting your personal information.

If you're lucky, a person who has access to your eBay account will be able to figure out where you live, and how to contact you. But, you know that less than scrupulous people won't just stop there.

As it stands, if you do choose to solicit adult material from eBay, there is a more secure way of doing so, directly through eBay, however, they do ask for your credit card information.

Unsuspecting eBayers may easily be duped by this, as it looks EXACTLY like the actual eBay auction screen. Firefox will be able to screen this out, as the auction link page redirects to a phishing site, which refers to the methods used to dupe people into giving up sensitive information.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.