Doubleclick allows phishers to set up scam redirects on its site ebayobjects.com? Is there a legit reason?

Question

For a long time I've rec'd phishing scam e-mails claiming to be from ebay - nothing new there. They say "click here" on a link and use lots of methods to hide the real URL desitnation. For some months I've noticed that the phishers are using real URLs at legit companies that redirect to the phishers' sites. I figured this hole would be closed quickly, but not so far. One hole is at ebayobjects.com, which actually is registered to Doubleclick. Example (mucked/cleaned up): h_ttp://us.ebayobjects.com/6k;h=h_ttp://**PHISHER_IP_ADDRESS**/eBayISAPI.dll-SignIn/index.php
Doubleclick must know about this but must be unwilling to fix it. Does anyone know the legit reason DClick allows/needs this redirect functionality to be available to its customers? In any event, I do wonder how they get away with this w/o having a major PR problem?

Maybe I need to clarify some things. The link in the spam e-mail takes me to ebayobjects.com and then redirects me to an IP address in China. I understand that one can make a page that looks like someone else's page. Here, though, the phishers are using a process on the ebayobjects.com server to cause an actual redirect. BTW, the URL segment that I posted is from the start of the actual URL code, not simply what appears as text in the spam e-mail. So, it really does send my browser to ebayobjects.com - and then redirects it..

(Also, I don't know who runs the servers at the ebayobjects.com domain, but according to the whois database ebayobjects.com is registered to Doubleclick.)

I can understand why ebay, doubleclick. google, etc., want to allow their customers to do all sorts of things when someone clicks on their ad, but redirecting should not be allowed. What I'd like to know is an example or two of legit functions for which someone needs this redirect function.

Answer 1

It's not a redirect involving Doubleclick. Ebayobjects.com is a domain that is used by eBay to store boilerplate images and script for the site. When you go to eBay, the page you see is assembled from images on a number of servers. Unfortunately the scammers have figured this out and are using the data at ebayobjects.com to assemble convincingly real phony eBay pages.

It's really a moot point anyway. Even if the images were all stored on the eBay.com domain, any scam artist with knowledge of the assembly of a web page by eBay could use those images to assemble the same realistic looking faked page.

Figuring this all out is child's play for anyone with a basic knowledge of html coding. Right-click on pretty much any web page anywhere and select "View Source" from the context menu to see the raw html code. For example, most of the graphics on the Yahoo! Answers page you're looking at right now come from a server on the yimg.com domain. And guess who owns the yimg.com domain. Yep, it's Yahoo!

Answer 2

1. What are the legitimate reasons for re-homing a dog? I think some legitimate reasons in no particular order would be that the owner has passed on, the dog does not get along well with the other pets in the household (this is only after trying to resolve the issue), the animal having a detrimental health effect on the humans it lives with. 2. What are the bogus reasons? The bogus reasons would be: you're moving, you have a new addition to the family and don't have time for the dog, the dog is no longer cute and nobody wants to spend time with it, it got too big, you weren't expecting the costs of health care to be as big, I could go on.