I Feel Violated

I feel violated tonight, faithful readers.  This afternoon, I discovered that I was the victim of identity theft.  I think everything is OK now; at least I'm hoping it is.  It all came down this afternoon at our 2:00 break at work.  I was checking my AOL mail, when I discovered an interesting email in my mailbox.  It was from an eBay member, saying that they would be sending me the $81 they owe me for a hoody jacket that they bought from me on eBay.  Only I didn't have anything for sale on eBay.  I did some quick checking at the My eBay page, and found out there was a total of 58 of these jackets up for bid on eBay that I was allegedly selling. 

The first thing I did besides almost go into cardiac arrest was to change my eBay and Paypal passwords.  Then I emailed eBay and told them what had happened.  I'd like to interject and thank two of my co-workers, GS and ET, for their help and moral support this afternoon.  Now on with the story.  We checked eBay and found out that there were $199 in insertion and other fees that they were going to charge me for all of these items up for bid.  That's when I thought the cardiac arrest was going to occur.  I was swamped at work, and couldn't just not work for the last two hours of the day, so I muddled through somehow.  I will say the rest of the day was a blur, except for my stomach doing flip-flops.  As soon as 4:30 rolled around, I got back online and went to the Live Help chat in eBay to try and get this taken care of quickly.  I've got to give a big shout out to Courtnei at eBay who took care of the ugly mess very quickly.  She was very good, and very professional.  She cancelled the remaining 56 auctions and got rid of the $199 fees, and assured me it was taken care of.  But I was still nerved up.

Nothing like this has ever happened to me, and I've spent all night worrying.  I went back in to eBay a dozen times, trying to see if the evil person that did this could have gotten my checking account information that is tied in with eBay.  Unless they knew the answers to the security questions, there's no way they could have.  At least that's what I'm hoping and praying.  Then I started thinking about how this could have happened.  I'm a big crusader for being cautious about the fake emails from eBay, so I'm 99.99% sure I didn't fall for one of those and sign into my account.  Then I started thinking about the firewall - I don't know if someone hacked into my computer through the firewall or not.  I guess I'll never know.

At work this afternoon, we were talking about why someone would go to such lengths to do this.  It wasn't for financial gain -- I would have been the one getting checks, money orders and payments to my Paypal account for 58 of these expensive hoody jackets, not the hacker.  We guessed it was just how they get off - being evil like that.  I know that what goes around comes around, so I know they'll get theirs.  I just hope they get it soon and get it big.