My purchase entitled me to enter a $5000 competition - now I'm inundated with unwanted texts

[pcsmith-2009]

I've spent thousands on ebay purchases and thanks to ebay sucking every last dollar from its users my relationship with ebay has taken a turn for the worse.  I made a substantial purchase which allowed me to enter an ebay competition and ever since I've been inundated with unwanted texts, emails offering all kinds of further data mining scams. 

 Yes, I am aware that when entering competitions we allow third party contact - but how frequent and for how long? Do I need to change my phone number and email address? 

I feel somewhat betrayed. Ebay makes enough without this kind of BS. 

[lyndal1838]

There is a moral to your story.....don't enter competitions which you will prpbably never hear about again.

There have been several posters on the boards asking how to find out who has won the competitions that have been advertised on ebay....answer is that no-one ever hears the results so maybe there never is a winner.

[joztamps]

Snowy on the trams.

[go-tazz]

Don't click on any of their links as there is one of these doing the rounds where you allow them to use your

"unused" energy/power from your PC to be used for currency mining,(it's actually a way for them to access

your computer and hand them control,like when a PC tech needs to access it to fix things).

As mentioned,no one knows anyone that's won one of these "competitions" and as you have found out it's

actually a gullibility tester that scammers/spammers use to find gullible people for contact purposes,(they will then

ring you,text you and Email you to try and con you into giving them personnel information or get you to click on 

a link in an Email so that they can install a Trojan or Keylogger to access your PC information.

[countessalmirena]

Exactly.

As go-tazz says, this is a self-selecting scam. Anyone who falls for the initial scam is very likely to become an unwitting "data mule".

But that's not all.

Anyone who falls for the initial scam is then self-identifying as a mark, someone who can be scammed again, and again, and again.

There have been instances of people being scammed out of thousands and thousands of dollars, in despair because of it, and then they finally realise they've been scammed... they tell the scammer NO MORE... and the next stage is an official-looking email from a government agency who is hunting down these scammers. The so-called government agency? The scammer wearing another hat.

[pcsmith-2009]

Thanks for the 'bleedin' obvious...but you miss my point.  How does a legitimate entity like ebay allow these promotions on its website.  This was not a third party pop up. This was without leaving the ebay 'site'. 

[padi*0409]

There's 3 at the top of this search you could look at, maybe one of them will help.

https://www.google.com/search?q=eBay+competition+scam&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b