Since August 9th, sellers on the discussion boards are reporting newly registered Austria buyers are doing Buy It Now purchases and then spam emails follow. This is happening to both US sellers, Thailand sellers and UK sellers. To help in detecting this, the following characteristics are:

1) Buy It Now Purchase
2) End of auction listing contact info will be jibberish such as shown below
3) 20 something email messages that follow immediately or over a few days that appear to be ebay messages, phishing or solicitation to sell you wholesale products, including ELECTRONICS.

 We believe they are trying to harvest contact info for phishing but a high probability is mailing address info so they can register addresses on the US site

Ways that you can PROTECT YOURSELF. Have all your listings set to block EUROPE and ASIA. The majority is definitely Hong Kong sellers that are registering in Austria (Europe).

Keep track of what they're doing. Save your completed listings. Do not email them. Immediately file a fraud alert and most important... let another seller know! If you belong to any discussion board, please look to organizing your seller group so that information flows to them as fast as possible. This is a global threat, be careful out there Ebayers!

-------example end of auction address info-----
A bunch of question marks
??????????

-------example-----
srdyuii ijhbugfu
fcyfguhgi
jhuihgufy
8121 xdtfyfgu
Osterreich

User IDs are looking like this
gwuqcdticz
pzdxdqsrdw

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This is Fruity with your tiperoonie!