Someone messaged me and said I had been part of a discussion where I did not send an item. Phishing?

[kpoland]

I got a message through eBay where someone clicked on an item I had for sale I believe and chose to contact me.  I thought it was an offer or question about the item.  Instead it said:

I𝗌 𝗂𝗍 𝗍𝗋𝗎𝖾 𝗐𝗁𝖺𝗍 𝗍𝗁𝖾𝗒 𝗌𝖺𝗒 𝖺𝖻𝗈𝗎𝗍 𝗒𝗈𝗎?

community.ebay.discussion.t12.t459.tk/441dbe/?32b3bd/Item-not-received/1e1d34/

𝖲𝗁𝖺𝗆𝖾 𝗈𝗇 𝗒𝗈𝗎!

The link didn't work.  I answer all messages and have not had an item that was not delivered.  Could this be a phishing attempt?  I can't figure out how to ask eBay because they have not actually purchased anything from me.  

[bill_and_ellie]

Never click on links in emails, especially if you don't know the sender! I mean, it looks like it wasn't even written in English. 

You may want to run your malware checker and see what your reward for clicking that link is.

[ckimodog]

This is Korean font and when I ran it through the translator, I got 

 I  heung hee hee he he he, he he hee..looks like someone has too much time on their hands.  I'd ignore it and block the senders ID.  

[alltheprettylittlethings]

That's certainly suspicious.

I would report them and put them on my blocked list for sure.  

[beautifulbeauty2012]

Can be either a new ebay glitch or North Korean (or pretended to be North Korean) hacking. ebay needs to secure the website. 

When I removed parts of the "message", I got "old heap" in Korean

[wrong66]

Yep. And do it quickly.

[wrong66]

eBay's website has been secure going on 27 years. If you blindly click on a link in an eBay email, that's not a problem associated with eBay. It's a problem created by you.

[beautifulbeauty2012]

you are wrong, wrong. Just google how many times ebay got hacked.

One of the most epic hacks was in 2014 (8 years ago) when 145 million accounts were hacked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_breaches

[eburtonlab]

I have seen such message before -- it is a simple but effective phishing message that works in many contexts.

The message "Is it true what they say about you?" is a classic scam message designed to get users to click on the link, which often appears to be for a common social media page. The user will often assume the message relates to something said about the user on social media or a discussion board, and for most people curiosity and anxiety about what others might be saying about us elsewhere is a very powerful motivator.

If you look carefully, the link is not to eBay at all, but to another site registered in New Zealand.

If the link had worked, you would have been sent to a realistic looking but fake eBay page, and you would have been prompted to sign in with your eBay username and password. Your credentials would have been stolen so your eBay account could be hijacked.

[bill_and_ellie]

It's a difficult argument to boast about 'how many times eBay has been hacked' when a Google search for that phrase literally only mentions the 2014 incident and one reference to a person offering to sell user information, not just from ebay, but another large online retailer.
Your own wikipedia link cites that same 2014 data breach.

To answer your challenge--- ONCE. ebay was hacked once.

[wrong66]

And not for any member's financial information.

[a_c_green]

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@kpoland wrote:

The link didn't work.  I answer all messages and have not had an item that was not delivered.  Could this be a phishing attempt?  

---

No, it's a malware attempt. While the link did not visibly do anything (if in fact it was still active; I'm not touching it), it's still possible for it to download malware to your machine behind the scenes. 

The key is to look at the actual link text, and how it ends prior to the first single forward slash, which is the end of the domain name. In what you show, the domain name does not end with ebay.com, but with .tk, a domain abbreviation for Tokelau (an island in the South Pacific which allows free domain name registrations).

It's a possibly toxic external link in what is a rather common spam message. You might want to ask the mods to edit it out of your original post.

[wrong66]

Links in eBay messages are also used to hijack member's accounts.

[albertabrightalberta]

---

@kpoland wrote:

I got a message through eBay where someone clicked on an item I had for sale I believe and chose to contact me.  I thought it was an offer or question about the item.  Instead it said:

I𝗌 𝗂𝗍 𝗍𝗋𝗎𝖾 𝗐𝗁𝖺𝗍 𝗍𝗁𝖾𝗒 𝗌𝖺𝗒 𝖺𝖻𝗈𝗎𝗍 𝗒𝗈𝗎?

community.ebay.discussion.t12.t459.tk/441dbe/?32b3bd/Item-not-received/1e1d34/

𝖲𝗁𝖺𝗆𝖾 𝗈𝗇 𝗒𝗈𝗎!

The link didn't work.  I answer all messages and have not had an item that was not delivered.  Could this be a phishing attempt?  I can't figure out how to ask eBay because they have not actually purchased anything from me.  

---

Scam/spam. 

An ebay discussion URL begins with "https://community.ebay.com/"  (dot com) but the one you received is (dot discussion) ".discussion." 

[chapeau-noir]

The message itself is really old timey, though - I remember getting "is it true what they say about you?" back in the late 90s.  Must be a new crop coming up.

The dot discussion rather than dot com would be easy to miss, though, if someone was wondering about the first bit of the message, so that's slick.