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Haha! To be quite honest I forgot I even still had this blog up… Thought I’d deleted it long ago!

Well, here’s a wierd one… Somehow my eBay account got hacked today and someone listed about 45 auctions of handbags, all with Buy Now options on them. I happened to check my email shortly after the auctions were posted, so I was lucky enough to get in & cancel most of them before anyone bid. Obviously I changed my eBay password straight away, but one person managed to jump in with a Buy Now and paid for the auction with Paypal to some yahoo.com address.

To make sure it was all dealt with as quickly as possible, I used the Live Chat feature to contact the security team at eBay and was amazed at the quality of response I got from them.

When I first opened the chat window, the messge at the bottom told me the approximate wait time was 14 minutes, so I waited. Exactly 14 minutes later (almost to the second), the chat started. I had pre-typed the first couple of entries before the connection started. Here’s the full chatlog :

While waiting for your chat to begin, you can start typing in your question. To help us address your questions as quickly as possible, please include your email address, eBay User ID and any other pertinent information such as item numbers, error messages, etc. (if available). We may also require your name, address and phone number for verification purposes.

Your entries will become visible to the agent once they have joined the chat. Thank you for your patience.
Kansalis: Hi…. I have received around 40 emails of items which have been listed on my account without my knowledge. I have cancelled all the auctions now and changed my password, but one of the items was bought by someonewith “buy now” (item 190033043755). I have contacted the buyer to inform him/her of the fraudulent listings already. I have also changed my password so this shouldn’t happen again.
Kansalis: The buyer has already sent the payment to the paypal account listed in the auction, which obviously doesn’t belong to me…. Could you please assist them to recover their payment? Also I would like to have the associated fees refunded to my account please.
Your chat session has started..
Golden G.: Hello and thank you for contacting Account Security Live Help, my name is Golden. Please give me a moment to review what you have already typed.
Golden G.: Thank you for your patience. In order to help you, I need to verify your information. Could you please provide me with your name, address, and telephone number? (Note that eBay would never ask you for sensitive information like passwords and credit card numbers)
Kansalis: sure
Kansalis: Jeff Mitchell
Kansalis: **home address removed**
Kansalis: **phone number removed**
Golden G.: thank you Jeff. Now I need to ask you a question only you can answer to ensure you are the true account owner. Can you provide me with the first e-mail address you registered on eBay?
Kansalis: wow, I’m not sure I can
Golden G.: Any old email addresses you might remember?
Kansalis: **email removed**?
Kansalis: **email removed**?
Golden G.: do you remember having a gmail email?
Kansalis: **email removed**
Golden G.: Thank you for verifying yourself. It appears that your account may have been accessed by an unauthorized third party. Did you receive an email either in your My Messages or personal email inbox with a link or button in it?
Kansalis: no not at all
Golden G.: You may also receive a spoof email in your My Messages or your regular email that has a respond now button or other sort of link in it. If you are unsure about the communication, you should report this or any other email you have questions about to spoof@ebay.com. To better protect yourself from spoof emails, you may want to consider downloading our eBay toolbar. (Not compatible with MAC) To learn more:

http://pages.ebay.com/ebay_toolbar/
Golden G.: eBay will never ask you to sign in to view an auction on eBay.com. You may be asked to sign in at several other points, including accessing certain categories, but never to view an auction.

Golden G.: Second Chance Offers will always appear in your My Messages. eBay will never send a Second Chance Offer email with the subject line “Question from eBay Member.” Any other email sent to your registered eBay email address from eBay that affects your account will also appear in My Messages.

Please be cautious about emails you receive in your personal email inbox that appear to be from eBay such as PowerSeller invites, updates to your billing information, or a warning that you may be suspended if you don’t confirm your account information.

Golden G.: I can tell you that billing, credit card, and bank account information is stored on a separate and secure server and cannot be viewed by anyone, even if they accessed your eBay account.
Kansalis: I’m very careful with URLs
Golden G.: All fraudulent items have been removed and credited to your ebay account. A notification has been sent to any bidders regarding the situation. Regularly changing your e-mail password is important. If a 3rd party has access to your email account, they could easily access your eBay account again by using the eBay ‘Forgot Password’ feature.

Have you changed your e-mail password for **ebay mail removed**?
Kansalis: no, I’ll do that right now
Golden G.: Thank you. I’ll be happy to wait while you make the changes, please let me know when you are finished!
Kansalis: That’s done
Kansalis: I already had the interface open
Golden G.: Thank you. Your account has been secured and is now active. You will be receiving a temporary password shortly after this chat is over to your email. Please change the temporary password once you are in your eBay account to a more secure password using a mix of letters and numbers. I’m glad I was able to help you today. When you close this chat window, you will be asked to fill out a survey. I would appreciate your feedback. Before we end our chat, is there anything else I can help you with?
Kansalis: yes please
Kansalis: will the person who bought one of th eitems be refunded?
Kansalis: also, how do I go about cancelling the aution which has been bought?
Golden G.: A notification has been sent to them as well to contact ebay directly to see what options they have.
Golden G.: I have already cancelled it
Kansalis: Ah ok, thankyou
Golden G.: You’re welcome! Have a great day and thank you for using eBay!
Kansalis: oh one last thing
Golden G.: Take care
Golden G.: sure
Kansalis: will my account charges be removed too?
Golden G.: All fraudulent items have been removed and credited to your ebay account. A notification has been sent to any bidders regarding the situation.
Kansalis: Excellent thank you very much for your help
Golden G.: You’re welcome Jeff
Golden G.: Take care
Your chat has ended. Please click the Quit button

All of the comments from Golden G were obviously scripted and copy/pasted from their system, but it was so fast I could hardly type two words before he’d pasted something else in the window. It was almost as if he’d been reading my mind.

As promised, all the auctions had been removed and all fees refunded before I even had a chance to log back into my account and click on my eBay inbox.

For anyone who has been dubious about using eBay in the past because of fraud, I really wouldn’t worry about it! If this is the kind of response you get when something dodgy happens, then why would you ever buy anything anywhere else?

I got very confused trying to track what’s going on with all this ADSL migration business, so I created a new Blog for it (Check the link in the nav bar).

I’ll keep all the DSL posts in there for now

Well, it’s finally time to move away from Plusnet… I’ve had my DSL with them for about 2 years and have never had any issues or problems with download speeds etc. A couple of months ago they started to offer a “Home Phone” product to accompany the LLU broadband, so I signed up. What a mistake! Ever since then the performance of my broadband has been nothing short of horrendous.

It seems I’m not the only one either. Their network has apparently taken a huge hit in performance across the board. P2P downloads for me have degenerated from the old-school 800Kb/s I used to get to less than 100Kb/s, no matter how fast or well-seeded the torrents are.

So, hence my new quest… Find a good reliable ISP with no download caps and a “fair” fair usage policy. As I’m moving my service elsewhere, I’m going to try to get myself a decent ADSL2+ connection while I’m at it. The options on my exchange are UK Online, Sky Broadband & Bulldog, with Be available in a couple of months.

I’m not too sure where to go just yet, so stay tuned!

Looks like my domains are being hosted on one of those new yoyo-branded servers. Up… Down…Up…Down. It’s getting very tedious. I’ve set myself up an account on http://www.siteuptime.com now so I can see how often it really goes down (or just when I happen to be trying to use the site myself).

Let’s see what happens…

Looks like my DSL at home has decided to cut itself in half. It’s now connecting at 4096 Kb/s instead of the 7600-odd it was negotiating at before. That’s not the only problem though…. The latency is horrible. It’s not just the speed of downloads etc, the response times on web browsing are frighteningly bad. More tickets to providers… *yawn*

My kids were talking over breakfast this morning about the music the younger one had put on. She has one of those Fisher Price indestructible cassette players. You know the type : Chunky plastic buttons, no frills, microphone on the side. Anyhow, the eldest asked her what else was on the tape she was playing. Her response “I don’t know, there’s no display on these old things is there?”. They both have CD players in their rooms, so are well accustomed to track skipping & random play…

But wait, you haven’t heard the best of it yet! A few minutes later after the conversation had stopped, the youngest pipes up again (she’d obviously been thinking about this for some time). “It’s really good how these tapes just carry on when from where they left off after you turn the player off isn’t it dad? Not like CDs where you have to start from the beginning again”.

Don’t you just wish you could have your digital dictaphone running 24×7 when kids are around?

As you can see from my post earlier today, I’ve been having some techy problems the past couple of days. I’ve made numerous phone calls, sent emails and updated online helpdesk tickets til I was blue in the face. Most of the time I’ve been greeted with email auto-replies or recorded messages.

It made a refreshing change today to get an email back from a real person about one of my trivial issues… I had problems with the theme I’m using on the site (of my own doing, I might add), so I sent an email from the web form on Scott’s site. Not only did I get an email back within about 10 minues, but the suggestion was spot on! Thanks Scott!

I’ve had the most ridiculous string of internet problems for the last few days. First of all this domain stopped working completely, so I called up my host to find out what’s going on. They told me there was a DoS attack currently hitting the shared server I’m on and it would be sorted “shortly”. Then the site started working for me again while I was at work, but I couldn’t get to it from home because of some routing issue or other. While I was waiting for all that to sort itself out, my internet connection at home dropped from being 7000Kbps ish to 80Kbps! I just gave up logging support tickets in the end & went to bed. Fortunately everything is now fine this morning…

Edit: Ok, so I lied. The site is dog-slow again now =( Only works when it feels like it & it’s taken me 4 attempts to get this posted. I think I’ll just give up for now & see if they can find something wrong this time.

Mygamercard.net updated their site & along with it a whole load of new Gamercard formats and colours. Looks like I need to update the widget again! No time for it right now, but will hopefully get cracking on it soon…