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eSnipe News - Special Story

Beginning Thursday, June 14th, we started to receive a few reports indicating that eBay was detecting the use of eSnipe and considering it "unauthorized third party access". eBay has chosen to change the login password for these accounts. Up to now, we have been dealing with this on a customer by customer basis through our support system. However, we see that a pattern has emerged so we feel that we should warn users that this situation might impact their eBay accounts when first using our site. We are not clear on all the circumstances but continue to investigate this situation.

What most users impacted so far have told us is that they are required to go to eBay and update their account password (some also the security question). Once they have done this, they are able to come back to their eSnipe accounts and update their eBay AUCTION ACCOUNT information on eSnipe and place bids as normal. This seems to be a one time situation and once corrected, the account is not flagged again.

We understand that receiving a notice from eBay that your account may have been accessed by a "third party" can be disturbing. We want to make sure that you know that this notice is most likely related to your use of eSnipe, and not an actual hacker situation. Once eBay knows you are using eSnipe intentionally, they seem to not be concerned further.

eSnipe has been helping users get great deals on eBay since 1999. We pioneered the idea of online sniping and have been performing this same service for almost 8 years. We have never disclosed our user list to any third parties, and we know of no security breaches since that time.

UPDATE: Starting 19:00 PDT, Monday, July 30th, it appears eBay changed their security measures and started marking an increased number of accounts as "unauthorized third party access". This situation is no longer impacting mostly new eSnipe users, but a wide range of users with varying levels of bidding activity. We continue to monitor this situation and hope that enough of eBay/eSnipe users will let eBay know this new security measure needs to be adjusted so that an eBay user can authorize a third party (like eSnipe) to place their bids for them.

We ask that you please contact eSnipe Customer Support ONLY if you have continuing problems updating your eBay account on eSnipe.

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