Top ten tips to protect your Ebay account 

When buying at an online auction, in order to safe guard your personal information being misused by unknown people, payments are always made using a third-party payment service which allows you to transfer money into an online account and make payments from that account without exposing your real credit card information. The most trusted of these services is PayPal owned by eBay.

Some tips to protect your Ebay account:

1. Disregard e-mails from third-party payment services asking to confirm account details like passwords and personal information, which is more likely to be phishing.

2. Make sure the seller is a verified member of the payment service of long standing. Some of these services allow checking the seller's rating, although the ratings are not fully dependable, but they can be helpful.

3. Be more careful while buying expensive things like jewelry or computers, especially around the holidays and for items that are sold-out in stores.

4. Sellers require information necessary to complete the purchase, such as your credit card number, mailing address, and telephone number. Be wary if they ask for your Social Security number, bank account numbers or your mother's maiden name.

5. Check for a secure environment before you enter your credit card details and personal information, such as https, and check if a tiny padlock appears at the bottom right of the screen.

6. Check whether they have the stamp of approval from 'BBB Online' (The Better Business Bureau Online) or Truste.

7. Find out what others have to say about these sites from comparison sites such as Epinions http://www.epinions.com or Bizrate http://www.bizrate.com

8. Ignore quick response eBay mails, fraudulently claiming that the recipient's account will expire and be terminated if you don't login through the link provided in the email within the next 24 hours.

9. Most phishing emails take you to fraudulent websites by providing links, using identical images, fonts-color schemes from the company's real web sites.

10. Some register identical domain names to those of reputable companies hoping to fool recipients into believing that they're logging on to the real site.