eBay spawns new social media spam technique

You have to kind of admire spammers, they’re constantly evolving their methods and abusing new features to fill your inbox. The latest evolution is the use of eBay’s new social media sharing features to propagate their junk mail.

eBay now have features to share items on eBay via Facebook, email and Twitter. Whilst there are warnings not to plug your own items as a complaint could result in account suspension, that doesn’t bother the spammers – they’ve got the ideal solution. They’re sharing my own items with me and appending their spam message.

As a bonus for the spammers the emails aren’t duplicated in eBay My Messages. It’s still a mystery to me why all communications don’t appear in My Messages so that they can at least be identified as authentic even if they’re spam.

I’m not sure I should risk reporting this one just in case some overzealous eBay customer service rep makes a mistake and removes my item or worse still applies sanctions to my eBay account – after all it’s my item that’s being spammed, albeit being spammed to me and not by me.

Of course there’s no way I’m daft enough to buy from some Chinese company that resorts to spam and doesn’t even have contact details on their website. I have no way to verify that they’re not selling fakes, counterfeits and sub-standard products, that is of course assuming they’d even bother shipping anything if I parted with my hard earned cash.

It would be nice if eBay were to offer an opt out from social media spam. It would be even nicer if they were to block spammers from sending me my own eBay items. I’m already aware of the products that I have listed on eBay, after all I was the one that listed them.