419/eBay claim 'a mystery'

2004-07-27 23:34

Cape Town - Senior South African police officers are to meet on Wednesday after an investigator in the commercial crimes unit of the South African Police Service issued a warning to South African online shoppers that 419 scammers had hacked into the database of eBay, the world's largest auctions website.

Inspector Rian Visser earlier warned South Africans who had given credit-card details to eBay to cancel their cards immediately. The hacking claims have since been stringently denied by an eBay spokesperson.

Visser directed online users at the weekend to the website 419legal.org where he said they could check their credit-card details against those contained in a "stolen" database.

Since the first report appeared in Beeld, sister newspaper of News24 and subsequently on News24, News24 has raised several questions regarding the website.

Points of contention included:

that the website is hosted independently of the official SAPS website;

that the website does not have a .gov.za suffix like other government-affiliated websites;

there is no direct link from the SAPS commercial crimes unit website to the 419legal website; and

any checks done against credit-card numbers on the website were not done on a secure server (after queries by News24, this has subsequently been changed and all checks are now being conducted via secure server).

Contacted by News24 on Tuesday, senior superintendent Mary Martins-Engelbrecht, spokesperson for the police, refused to be drawn on the claims made by Visser or on the 419legal website.

She was to meet Visser's boss on Wednesday and said a statement would be issued after the meeting.

An incredulous eBay spokesperson Hani Durzy, talking to News24 on Tuesday night, again denied any hacking and said the company would further comment after the SAPS statement had been issued.

Not contacted by secret service

Durzy earlier told the auctionbytes.com website that "eBay's database was not hacked, eBay's credit-card database had never been hacked, and it was not hacked here".

He said eBay was never contacted by the US secret service, nor the South African police as claimed in the original report.

He also said eBay was skeptical of the methods used by the 419legal site to check credit-card details.

An eBay statement earlier in the day said:

"We are receiving questions from users related to an article in the news alleging that a third party may have accessed credit-card information from eBay's systems.

"These claims are completely false. Our credit-card database has not been 'hacked', and no third party has accessed any eBay members' credit-card information through our systems.

"We will investigate the source of these allegations and take appropriate action. At this point, we have not been contacted by any law enforcement authority regarding this rumour."

- News24