There was an interesting TV programme on BBC in the UK last night in the series 'Horizon' and it showed how hackers took over the pc of a pc industry expert, and it wasn't difficult. Though I wasn't paying full attention, the tactic used is what is described as 'social engineering' but not in the form you'd expect. The point is that the security of your pc and data is in the hands of all the sites and companies with whom you are signed up and who hold your data. It only takes one of those people to slip up and you can be compromised.
In this case the hackers contacted an ad site and added a dummy credit card to the account, and doing that was accepted without any security check. Then they went back and were able to use details of that bogus card to identify themselves as the account owner and from there they were able to take over everything he had and they wiped his pc and i pod to block him from challenging what they did.
Alarmingly these weren't sophisticated hackers but merely teenage vandals who did it because they could. We know that there are fraudsters offering eBay users deals to use their accounts as they've come here to tell us. If some are doing it unwittingly, undoubtedly others may be doing it knowing it's being done for unscrupulous purposes.
As the eBay second chance offer scam invariably requires the victim to go off the eBay platform to actually pull off the fraud then it seems possible that the seller's account is compromised in some way, but not a full take over. It's amazing how easily people will give information out if they can't immediately understand how it can be misused. If a fraudster has a half sensible reason, the seller may be giving out the information in all innocence. Of course a seller is then going to be reluctant to admit having done this.
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