Christmas shoppers targeted in Aussie phishing campaign

Graham Cluley
Graham Cluley
@

 @grahamcluley.com
 @[email protected]

Australian online shoppers are being targeted in a phishing campaign which pretends to be from Trading Post. (For those who don’t know, Trading Post is an Antipodean competitor to internet auction site eBay).

The offending emails warn that your account has expired and must be renewed online – which sounds like bad news if you had some last-minute Christmas shopping in mind.

Trading Post phishing email

But if you click on the link it doesn’t take you to the real Australian Trading Post site, but a clone which asks for your username and password. The bogus site even goes as far as to reproduce Trading Post’s warning that the company will never send you an email asking you to sign in from a link inside the email – it’s a shame more people don’t follow this very sound advice!

Sign up to our free newsletter.
Security news, advice, and tips.

A little investigation uncovers that the fake pages are being served from a baseball fan’s website which has been hacked to host the phishing content. The site is also hosting a phishing site targeting Italian PayPal users.

Update: The breaking news is that the hacked site now appears to have been blocked by the hosting ISP, redirecting you to a warning page which advises that the site has been reported as hostile. Good security solutions can also be expected to block the bad URLs and the bad content, even if the offending webpages haven’t yet been taken down.


Graham Cluley is an award-winning keynote speaker who has given presentations around the world about cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. A veteran of the computer security industry since the early 1990s, he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows, makes regular media appearances, and is the co-host of the popular "The AI Fix" and "Smashing Security" podcasts. Follow him on Bluesky and Mastodon, or drop him an email.

What do you think? Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.