After getting the email scam from Amazon a couple weeks ago, today I got a scam mail sent from Canada by a company called “Inter-state marketing ltd” trying to jack my money! It comes with a $3995.00 check for me to deposit. I was surprised about it since it doesn’t look like those from the credit card company which don’t really pay. Then I opened the letter to check it out. It has a U.S. address in the header and it is from a company called “Inter-State Marketing Ltd.,” which I have never heard of. It also says that I have applied their “Customer Service Evaluator” position, which I have never been aware of either. It basically tells me to deposit $3415.00 to Western Union plus the service charge $170.00 WITHIN 48 hours, and it “pays” the rest $410.00 to me. It sounds too good to be true. After I do that I have to call a number with area code 905 (which is a Canadian number) and give them the MTCN number. WTH? That’s obvious telling me to give the money to them, because I have sent money to others this way before! What if the check is a bad check and it bounces back after they jacked the money? The letter also tell me to fill out the customer evaluation form and the schedule request sheet (which was missing in the mail) and fax it back to their office. I didn’t try it because it is too likely to be scam and I don’t want to risk it.
The mail is obvious from Canada because it has Canadian address and postage plus a Canadian phone number to reach back. Also on the check it has both English and French on the back, which tells me that the check must be from Canada, while it has U.S. bank addresses in the front!
Does anybody have similar experience of getting such scam mail?
The affiliate program of ACOP(American Consumer Opinion) is sometimes broken. The affiliate server has been down twice for long time since I joined it, either for the view report page or for the affiliate links. Once the server is down when you try to open one of those pages you’ll get an http 500 server error with the message “Server Error in ‘/’ Application.” There must be an error in the server’s configuration that needs to be fixed.
There’s another glitch in that affiliate program’s design, that the text links are not supposed to have impressions. Since the static text links are just a bunch of code within the web page, when we load the web page we don’t load anything from the server that tracks the link’s impressions. Impressions can only be tracked from the ads that load images, scripts, or others from the server. Because of this mistake I get only one impression in total per many clicks and a click through rate much higher than 100%. That was not possible. The first time I saw this I was frightened, until I realize that they can know how many times the link is clicked, but not how many times it’s loaded.
The other mistake in the affiliate program is that if you use an email address with numbers only in the domain name like ***@163.com or ***@126.com, it rejects the registrations automatically. That affected many users from China since many of them use those kinds of email address. I didn’t realize that until many people told me that they had failed the registration, and they all used those kinds of email address. This glitch is more serious and I hope they fix that as soon as possible.
update: Although There’s some glitches in its affiliate program, it actually PAYS, on 12/23/2006 I got the check from it.
I have gotten several times a message from AVG Antivirus Free 7.1 that says “Your AVG Anti-Virus 7.1 will be discontinued on 15. January 2007!” I always thought that avg is not going to be free anymore, since many free software that become paid have that kinds of notice. Until today I paid more attention on what it said I realized that it’s just a notice that tells us to upgrade to AVG 7.5 for free. I can’t upgrade to AVG 7.5 in the update manager, I had to go to AVG‘s website to download it and install it using the Repair Install option, after that restart and everything is done. I’m very happy that AVG keeps its antivirus software for free, I hope that they’ll also keep it for free in the future.
SoCal Free Net is a very good free dialup ISP , it’s free for anyone living in Southern California. Unlike NetZero or Juno, it doesn’t have time limit or requires you to install any kind to software in order to use it. It’s very useful for Backup Internet Connection when your dsl connection fails. The drawback of this freebie is that the ISP blocks almost all ports except for those you use to view web pages, as what it said from its website Q&A: “This service is designed for web browsing only. You will not be able to set up a server on your own machine, nor will you be able to connect with telnet, ftp, ssh, SMTP, etc.” It basically only opens port 80, 8080, 443 for https and maybe others for you to visit websites, but it doesn’t monitor the traffics on the ports, despite what the website says, you’re still able to connect to ftp, telnet or other services that uses the http ports instead of their standard ports, also you can use Instant Messengers such as AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and MSN Messenger over there since they only need the http ports. Overall it’s a very good ISP that gives you a worthwhile free dial up service.
“Security camera footage of a laptop being stolen, in broad daylight.
To read the story – see http://www.stubbedtoe.co.nz/blog/blog.php?blog=10
The guy hasn’t yet been caught. ”
That video made me remember that once my sister’s laptop was also stolen in broad daylight when left unattended in the library, the thief wasn’t cought either, sad ……………………… Fortunately the laptop was the oldest generation that can only run Windows 98, it’s almost worthless now anyways.
Tips and tricks and tech thoughts for computers, internet, and mobile.
……………………… Fortunately the laptop was the oldest generation that can only run Windows 98, it’s almost worthless now anyways.