Identity Damn Thieves

There are many different online identities. One person can be many people in cyberspace, just by creating a different screen name, log in, identity number or one of many other possible ways to develop identities on the net. An example of how one person can be many different identities on the net would be as simple as AOL. One person can have multiple screen names, giving them multiple identities. Whether they want to make each these identities alike or different is up to the person behind the computer.

The types of identity I want to talk about are EBay identities. In the EBay community identities are created by making a profile, which includes your person information that only EBay is suppose to be able to see, and items that you are trying to sell or buy. Creating an Identity is very simple, and a person can have more than one in this type of system. Someone could literally set up a new ID for every type of product they sell. This makes establishing an ID very simple. One such ID that I am familiar with on EBay is Hacent, I will explain why later.

The way that you can build your ID’s reputation in the EBay community is through transactions. After you either buy or sell something on EBay users rate each other on how they transact business. The more items that you have transacted business on with feedback the more legitimate your reputation rather it be good or bad. If you see someone with 100 transactions and a 70% positive feedback rating, then you know that the user is not a good person to do business with. On the other hand if you see a user that has a 99.7% positive feedback rating on 1000 transactions then you can feel confident in transacting business with this user. On the same token if someone has a 99% positive feedback rating, but has only transacted 10 items, then you would want to be weary because of how few transactions they have. In the case of EBay it is easy to establish a good reputation throughout the community as long as you are honest, and actually send what you sell. There are many ways people can take over your online identity.

In the case of AOL instant messenger and other services like that taking over a person’s identity is as easy as registering in a different messaging service (yahoo messenger, etc.) and making the same name. As far as EBay is concerned taking over someone’s identity is a little more difficult. I do not know how to take over an EBay identity (mainly cause I’m not a hacker), but I do know that it can be done because it has happened to me. The screen name that I mentioned above (Hacent) is the person that I was referring to in my last blog that attempted to steal money and my credit card number from me. Hacent had a 97.6% rating with an excessive amount of transactions, so when I decided to do business with this person I did not expect to have any problem. Like the last blog said I got ripped off on some motorcycle lights, and the thief attempted to use my credit card to make some other purchases. I reported this incident to a number of people, which by the way were all worthless, but one of the people I reported it to was EBay. After explaining the situation to them, they said there was nothing they could do for me because an unauthorized user had been accessing the account during the time period when I had my problem. I further questioned EBay’s customer relations department to see if I could find out more details, but came up empty handed. They claimed that they did not know who had accessed the account and that there was nothing they could do for me. This was my first and only experience so far with identity theft on the net, but it proved to me that it can happen and there’s really know way to know about it until after you’re a victim. Luckily I’m not in the guy’s shoes that had his EBay reputation ruined and has to rebuild it.