Trade Me account holders who are receiving emails today asking them to provide account login details should not hand them over.

The act is coming from overseas scammers who are using a stolen website domain to pretend to be Trade Me and ask the site's account holders for their personal information.

Trade Me has been hit by scammers sending phishing emails.

Trade Me head of trust and safety Jon Duffy says people are receiving emails from a source that looks like Trade Me but it is actually from a scammer using a stolen domain.

'It is called a 'phishing send” from a fake email – it has gone out relatively widely from scammers overseas pretending to be part of the Trade Me team,” says Jon.

Phishing involves an overseas scammer taking over a third party's website and pretending to be a company like Trade Me in an effort to get people to supply their personal details by clicking on a link from the fake website.

Jon says the scammers harvest people's personal information with aim to use details to commit fraud.

'They will do this either by phishing your information from your Trade Me account – or if they know other information about you – they use your passwords that you may use across other accounts to gain access to your financial details.

'From here they commit fraud with your financial information or sell it to other scammers for use.”

Jon says people should never click a link, in an email, that asks you to provide account details.

'Trade Me never asks people for their login details via email because we already hold your login information – it is safely stored in a secure database.”

If an email is sent to you by a domain or website that you are not familiar with – or if you receive a suspicious email, contact Trade Me's team on [email protected]

'This phishing email has gone out quite widely – it is impossible for us to tell how many people received it because some have identified it as fake or their spam filters have picked it up.”

However, 10 people have contacted Trade Me saying they entered details into fake website and supplied details to the scammer.

'We've been able to secure these people's Trade Me accounts.”

Jon says Trade Me got an external security provider to take down the fake website within 40 minutes of the phishing email being sent.

'If anyone clicks on the link now it will be dead – they would get an error message, so the danger of people responding to that email has now passed and the window of people being compromised is relatively small – but given the number of enquiries we've received it could be that that a lot of people received this email.”