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Posted By: Bill Cornell

Charles' explanation above is correct. This isn't 'hacking' as it's commonly thought of. Every time you log onto eBay, it's recording information about your browser and your computer, which then becomes your 'footprint'. When they see you logging in from multiple locations (home, work, snipe service, etc.), the information doesn't match up exactly, so some accounts will get flagged as suspicious.

This is an attempt to stop ATO's (account takeovers) that were a plague until recently (what are those Romanians up to now? I'd ask craigslist...).

By the way, it's a lot more than just your IP address that gets captured. Below is a typical header with characteristics of a session.

Host: show-ip.net
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: [the URL where you came from, if known]


Bill