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Johannesburg - The American Secret Security Service (SSS) and the commercial crimes unit of the South African police have joined forces in a massive investigation after a Nigerian 419 fraud syndicate hacked into the database of eBay, the world's largest internet auction house.
The 419 syndicate also hacked into the database of an American internet service provider, E-tronics.
The highly confidential details of around 400 000 people are involved in the two investigations. Thousands of South Africans conduct business on eBay.
Although eBay is based in the US, millions of people across the world transact on the site.
Inspector Rian Visser of the commercial crimes unit, who specialises in 419 investigations, confirmed on Sunday that he held a meeting with the SSS on Wednesday. The people behind the 419 scam gained access to the credit card numbers, including the three numbers at the back of the credit card, addresses and identity numbers of thousands of eBay clients and have started to distribute this to other syndicate members.
( more )
-Jim
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South Africia does not show on the US eBay Home page as a seperate site.
I wonder which pimary site it is run from?
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glad to hear they are doing something even if the horse is already out of the barn......
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Nothing on ebays site. Maybe in a couple days...
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Want to make a bet there was no hacking of ebay...just the gathering of information from those wonderful scam emails purportedly from ebay, citibank, earthlink, BankOne...you know, the ones where the unwary give out their creditcard info (including the digits on the back of the card), their name, address, bank account number, mother's maiden name, bank routing number, drivers lisence number, passport number, debit card password, ebay password, social security number, and various other items so that their identity can be stolen.
It has been a while since I updated my credit card info on ebay but they have never asked for the security digits on the back of my credit card (not that I can remember!)...so it seems to me that if those crooks have such info they didn't get it from ebay.
Does anyone remember if ebay requested the security digits when they put their credit card on file?
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eBay Denies Report of Database Hack
By Ina Steiner
AuctionBytes.com
July 27, 2004
eBay said a report that its database had been hacked by fraudsters was
untrue.
An article on the News24.com Web site (http://digbig.com/4bkye)
reported Monday that a South African police inspector said members of
the Nigerian 419 syndicate had hacked into eBay's database. eBay
spokesperson Hani Durzy said, "eBay's database was not hacked, eBay's
credit card database has never been hacked, and it was not hacked
here. We are in constant communication with the U.S. Secret Service,
they have not contacted us, and we have not heard from South African
police."
Durzy also said eBay is skeptical of the methods used by the site
reporting the supposed incident, 419legal.org site. "The site asks
people to input their credit card numbers to see if they are part of a
database of stole credit card numbers," said Durzy. He said this
method is not good practice on the Internet.
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Ebay is sure acting funky today. Homepage changes and images are disapearing from our auctions. Watch your html in the auctions.