I've come across a couple of accounts that use the same "pawn shop liquidation" scam to either steal money or collect personal information of users. From what I can tell, the scammer accounts post listings for valuable vehicles, clothing or collectibles at very low starting bid prices. In the description, there is a short story about "closing a pawn shop" and "liquidating business", which directs users to an external website if they want to buy the item now.
These websites are six digit numbers with a .com domain, but they are disguised in the listing as www.ebay.com.######.com or the like to appear as if it is an eBay page. After some investigation, these websites are unsecured and have thousands of listings, which can be viewed in the /CT/ directory. Simply going to the website itself presents a blank page that reads "Thank you", but the /CT/ directory is where the listings really are. There are fake seller HTML templates in here as well, and a .zip file of all the listings, which are some crude "eBay Store" clone that looks awful but apparently fools some people. I found that if you try to buy the item, the website asks for a bunch of information from you, and since there is no check for this information being valid I saw that after you enter it you are told to "wait for contact" from the seller.
I've found two accounts that have done this exact same scam, both with very high feedback scores, which makes me think they may have been hijacked for this purpose. I have since reported and contacted both of these users. After I contacted one seller they removed all their auction listings, but seem to have some BIN listings which are probably also fradulent. As I said before, I am new to eBay so this could be a well known scam, but I thought I would bring it to the attention of the community as it seems to be a pretty large operation given the sheer quantity of items that are on the fake websites.
Thanks for taking the time to read and please spread the word.
