A Mr Agus Santoso was selling an item on ebay with the emailid:
greatsynthesizer@seller2003.com. I told Mr Santoso I would wire money
to his account for an ebay item. Before going to my bank I summarized
the transaction that was going to take place in an email to him. The
email account was no longer active. He said that this email id "was
hacked". He now is residing in Indonesia with an Indonesian email
provider (I checked this on google; it was not obvious at first). I
would like to know if this is a valid problem. I tried to find the
provider seller2003.com and suspected it was an interim Ebay account.
I think he terminated the email account as soon as he thought that I
would send the money.

If you could shed any light on "email hacking" and whether this would
prevent the functioning of the account I would appreciate it.

regards,

joe byrne

If you do a google newsgroups search for seller2003.com you will find
a thread which, whilst not answering your question about email
hacking, may be of interest.

Owain

Are you asking about identity theft problems on eBay?   In those
cases, someone gets the password for a person's eBay account.  They
then access the account and list items for sale.  For awhile the
person whose account was hijacked is not aware of the problem.  Some
more on this:

http://glennf.com/gmblog/archives/00000126.htm
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/03/1044122303141.html
http://ecommerce.internet.com/news/news/article/0,,10375_1584531,00.html

If you still want the item and he still wants to get paid, and you
feel uneasy about this, advise him you insist on using
http://escrow.com or your going to not proceed with the transaction. 
http://escrow.com/ will protect both the buyer and seller. Read up on
the details on the site, dont just wire the money because your are
pressured by the seller to do so.

Good luck, HTH.
Andrew

One US seller on ebay says in her notes that she will not supply to
some countries.

I asked if that would apply to me (living in the UK) ... She said no
but she had to be careful because she had had problems with bidders
from Indonesia.

She didn't amplify and I didn't ask.

If something on ebay sounds fishy, it probably is.  I wouldn't send
someone money who hasn't earned my trust.  Ebay auction fraud is one
of the leading complaints to the FTC in the U.S. over the past 2
years.

I had the same problem, and never ended up selling my computer to him
b/c it seemed too shady. I had my computer on eBay and this dude wrote
and said he had had problems and lost money via Paypal before, so he
wanted to pay me directly with a credit card number.  He also lived in
Indonesia.  While my auction was still up, one more person tried to do
the same thing from Indonesia.  I think there is a scam going on, but
I'm not sure.  Have fun and be careful!

It's a typical ebay scam.  Don't send your money.