eBay a Reported Web Forgery! What the heck?

You have almost fallen victim to a common hacking attempt to steal your eBay credentials and shut you out of your own account on the popular auction site.

The email you received is fake and did not come from eBay.

How do I know that for sure? Because I'm 99% sure that what you received was what we call a "phishing" attack, a message that requests you log in to a specific site to "clear up a misunderstanding" or "correct an error" or, in this case, "dispute a complaint".

Luckily I have one of these same sort of messages in my mailbox too, and it looks like this:

Now put your cursor over the "Review payment details" link and -- if you have a good email program -- the URL that you'd visit will pop up:

As you can see, it's not an "https://www.ebay.com/..." address by any means, because it's some bad guy who has a site that's pretending to be eBay so it can sucker you out of your login info. A quick "whois" query and it turns out to be an IP addressed assigned to HINET Network Center in Taipei, Taiwan, of all places.

If you were to click on this link, which you did, then you're in luck because Firefox also knows it's a phishing site and protects you:

In fact, click on "Why was this site blocked?" and you'll learn that

"Firefox 3 or later contains built-in Phishing and Malware Protection to help keep you safe online. These features will warn you when a page you visit has been reported as a Web Forgery of a legitimate site (sometimes called “phishing” pages) or as an Attack Site designed to harm your computer (otherwise known as malware)."

In general, if you get any email from a site saying you need to resolve something, log in to that site directly by typing its URL into your Web browser then go to the account information area to see if the message appears there too. If it's there, the email is legit. If it's not, you just smartly side-stepped a phishing attempt, good job!