Note: This post is severely OFF-TOPIC and possibly only slightly comprehensible to the RB tech head community.
This is a link to a thread at the eBay "Trust & Safety" discussion board, where I lurk from time to time.
The relevant background here is that eBay's founders had a great concept for this global peer-to-peer marketplace, but an overly optimistic view of human nature. Their mission statement begins with: "We believe that people are basically good" and this single line has hamstrung eBay's security obligations essentially from its first auction. eBay has grown to be its own little ecosystem, with vast numbers of people flowing through and around the system at any given second. And like in any large complex ecosystems, malicious and opportunistic elements are drawn like flies to carrion. At eBay, the swarms are scammers, thieves, skriddies, haxorz, and Eastern European mafiosi.
The "Trust & Safety" (T&S) discussion board is a user-to-user group where folks who feel they've been scammed or ripped off can go to request help or information for their specific situation. Over the years, I've seen that many internet scams and security vulnerabilities are reported first at the T&S board. eBay rarely fixes the problems that are examined there, at least not until they become a problem that costs them money out of their own treasury.
At any rate, the link here goes to a very interesting discussion of some new twists on old eBay scams. Don't click on the links embedded in that thread; you can follow the commentary on the eBay page just fine.
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