eBay’s official blog, The Chatter, has posted more details on Tuesday’s incident where member details and credit card information were posted on an eBay message board. As we expected, the information is said to have been probably the result of a phishing exercise.
While the issue was very unfortunate, it was clearly falsified to cause public concern. Early on eBay’s teams verified that the credit card “data” did not match anything on file for these members on eBay or PayPal. After more investigation, including phone conversations with many of the members, it appears that these numbers were not valid at all.
Some members did claim on Tuesday that some of the information posted was valid. How valid that claim itself might be is debatable: would someone, seeing their credit card information made public, *really* confirm that it was correct?!
eBay now state that “the credit card ‘data’ did not match anything on file for these members on eBay or PayPal”. So whether that’s the absolute truth or eBay attempting to protect members’ financial information, I guess we’ll never know.
One Response
I would probably take this to be true. If eBay outright lies on this they would be caught (someone would have taken a screen shot). I think eBay probably has some legal liability if they data is real, and would have to prove that to a court if needed.