Hi Community,
As some contributors to this thread have pointed out, it is not uncommon for hackers to send out emails purporting to be from Auctiva, or any other service that can be exploited for financial gain, with the intention of stealing the account information of unsuspecting users. It is important to understand that this happens and to treat any emails containing links to pages that ask for sensitive information with caution.
We have seen several variations of SPOOF emails circulate over the years, but the token generation theme seems to be the most common, most likely because the token generation process requires entering both your Auctiva credentials and your eBay credentials and would allow the sender to get both sets of credentials at the same time.
Generally speaking, I would simply recommend not clicking links in emails that ask you for sensitive information. However, you can typically confirm whether an email is a SPOOF by clicking the provided link and looking at the URL of the page you are directed to.
For example, if you click a link in an email that is said to be from Auctiva and you are taken to a page with a URL that does not begin with “www.auctiva.com”, then the email you received is definitely a SPOOF and you should forward it to abuse@auctiva.com so we can work on getting the SPOOF site taken down as soon as possible.
It is difficult to state where these people get the email addresses they send these emails to, but I believe that it was common for them to be parsed from the descriptions of eBay listings and that could have been one of the reasons that eBay no longer allows sellers to enter email addresses in listings. We hear from some sellers who have received these emails even though they have never signed up for Auctiva before.
Also, remember that you can always generate a new token directly through your Auctiva account by logging in through Auctiva.com, mousing over the “My Account” tab, selecting the “eBay” option under “Settings” and then clicking the “Get New Token” on that page to avoid any possibility you might be biting on a SPOOF email.
I hope you find some of this information to be helpful. If you have any other questions, please feel free to contact our customer support team by mousing over the “Help” tab and selecting the “File Support Case” option.
-Mike