Members of eBay at their US eBay,:::::.com/db2/thread.jspa?threadID=2000439492&start=0" rel="external nofollow">forum contacted ebays live help support team within a very short period of the first posts appearing, some were alleged to have been told to report the posts individually so that they could be looked into by message board staff. There were eventually around 1200 posts and with their regularity increasing the board was finally closed down. It remains unclear why eBay took over an hour and 12 minutes to finally shut the T&S message board to the public. They have denied that the credit card information included within the T&S board posts was authentic although have admitted that the addresses and other details were legitimate ones.

Some believe that the 32 digit alpha numerical sequence in the posts titles were the eBay data base's unique tag for the particular users ID being posted. As for the posts with "Wheeeee" in the title one can only speculate what the final 6 numbers represented, eBay employees maybe?

So far there have been very few reports in the media on the apparent 25th Sept. hack. Some sources believe that Vladuz was responsible for the attack, a Romanian who claims to have acquired the ability to penetrate the company's perimeter at will.

An eBay user who published a list of affected members to help alert users to those ID's compromised in the attack has since been NARU'd which is an eBay anacronym for, no longer a registered user.

As reported on The Auction Guild in February 2007, a German site Falle-Internet which provides information on online fraud, and scams, in particular ones involving eBay.de, was displaying screen shots provided by V of log in panels which should only be visible to eBay staff. These images have since been removed following emails from ebays legal department.

Earlier today a thread allegedly posted by V on an eBay forum linked to an eBay employees "about me" page which had been altered to display the employees address and email. That page and any relevant links have since been removed but we have screen grabs of both the about me page and the forum entries allegedly posted by V with a hacked user ID!

The link in the forum post pictured above led to the alleged eBay employees "About Me" page pictured below.

The hacked about me page was allegedly "live" online for over 4 hours!

So to summarise it appears that ebays security may have been seriously compromised for sometime and it looks as if it still is!

Or.... It all could be just a clever hoax?