A known hacker who has been harassing eBay since last December used a Google email address on Friday to taunt members who had been critical of his actions. The same email address had been reported in January as having been used in scams to defraud buyers on eBay and other marketplaces.

Two eBay users who say they were locked out of the site briefly on Friday by "Vladuz" said he emailed them using the account "sgissc19@gmail.com," an email address that is included on a list of addresses reportedly used by scammers to defraud eBay buyers. The Nekkid Truth blog (http://nekkidtruth.blogspot.com) lists what appears to be hundreds of email addresses that it states are those belonging to "thieves" and "scam artists" that it said it culled primarily from eBay listings.

The Nekkid Truth published the email address sgissc19@gmail.com on its warning list on January 29, 2007, along with many variations such as sgissc2@gmail.com and sgissc2@googlemail.com.

Fraudsters typically encourage shoppers to contact them by email to get a better price or free shipping. Once contacted, they instruct the victims to send money through wire transfer services such as Western Union. Scammers even sell "eBay scam toolkits" instructing others on how to commit fraud on eBay (http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y06/m04/i18/s01). Apparently the Nekkid Truth blog culled email address from suspicious listings on eBay and other marketplaces and published them to warn other users.

It's unknown whether eBay could search its archives looking for auctions that may have displayed the email address in order to help it gather more evidence to track down the hacker.

See details of Friday's security incident on the AuctionBytes blog, "Hacker Vladuz Accesses eBay Servers, Suspends Accounts."
http://blog.auctionbytes.com/cgi-bin/blog/blog.pl?/pl/2007/10/1191718840.html