Category: Rants

Rants about polit­ics or oth­er issues

More Scams

My pre­vi­ous post on scams was writ­ten without tak­ing into account a rather more dis­turb­ing devel­op­ment in the spam/scam scene. I recently received spam that claimed to have lots of cred­it card num­bers for sale, prices vary­ing accord­ing to the issu­ing coun­try and how many card num­bers you wanted. I went to the web site and there were lots of cards there (middle digits miss­ing). I checked for my card num­ber, which was­n’t there. There was no list­ing of Cana­dian cred­it card num­bers, so there is some­thing to be said for not liv­ing in the neigh­bour­hood’s biggest country.

This is so blatant, and, unlike the phish­ing scams, is some­thing the cred­it card com­pan­ies should be dir­ectly inter­ested in stop­ping since the money to cov­er fraud­u­lent card use comes out of their profits. Unless… maybe the email was a scam, and some­body is fish­ing to find people who want to buy such num­bers. Lots of scope for con­spir­acy the­or­ies there! 

Phishing for Jurisdiction

Tim has a post and won­ders why the crim­in­als are so blatant when it should be easy to track them down. 

I think the answer is simple — nobody feels that they’re responsible. 

We live in Canada, the phish­ing attempt was about a US com­pany, and the phish­ing script is run­ning on a Thai web site. That’s a min­im­um of three police forces that would need to agree a) that it’s a prob­lem, b) that it’s a prob­lem they should do some­thing about, c) that it’s a prob­lem they can do some­thing about and d) that it’s a prob­lem they should work togeth­er to solve. Point a) sounds trivi­al, but depends on the pre­cise laws in three coun­tries (as an inter­est­ing aside, in the dim recesses of my memory I remem­ber read­ing some­where that for some years it was not illeg­al to coun­ter­feit cur­ren­cies in Aus­tralia as long as you did­n’t coun­ter­feit the Aus­trali­an cur­rency). Point b) depends on wheth­er the vari­ous police forces think it’s a worse prob­lem than many oth­ers they have to solve. And I would think that rip­ping rich-world people off for some money is way below people traf­fick­ing (to give just one example) in terms of inter­na­tion­al police priorities.

Of course, the Thai gov­ern­ment could decide that such phish­ing attempts occur­ring on Thai web sites were dis­turb­ing poten­tial investors in Thai­l­and and do some­thing about it on their own, much as I gath­er the Nigeri­an gov­ern­ment is tak­ing steps to clean up the Nigeri­an spam prob­lem. That does assume the prob­lem is per­ceived as being big enough to be worth solv­ing. In this case, you nev­er know. thaiedresearch.org is registered to the “Office of the Edu­ca­tion Coun­cil” which sounds at least semi-offi­cial; do they know about the phish­ing script? If they know, do they care?

Electoral Sadness

The Elect­or­al Vote Pre­dict­or 2004 web site has some sad­den­ing com­ments about the US elect­or­al sys­tem today. The sad­dest is a point­er to the BBC story of ex-Pres­id­ent Carter­’s con­ten­tion that Flor­ida does not ful­fill inter­na­tion­al require­ments for a fair elec­tion. Since Flor­ida has so many votes asso­ci­ated with it, it is a determ­in­ing factor in the US elec­tion, and any wor­ries that it is not going to fairly reflect the will of the elect­or­ate there will cause con­cerns about the fair­ness of the elec­tion overall.

The oth­er issue is that it appears that polling organ­iz­a­tions are no longer com­ing up with num­bers that can be trus­ted. When two polls in the same state come up with com­pletely dif­fer­ent num­bers, neither poll can be trus­ted. Although this is bad news for the trust­wor­thi­ness of the polling agen­cies, per­haps over­all it’s good news? If instant polls don’t work, and polls in gen­er­al are dis­cred­ited, one can always hope that one out­come will be politi­cians who do what they think is right for the major­ity of the people, rather than what will earn them a short-term blip in the polls. Of course, people will always dis­agree over what is “right”, but a little time for thought and per­haps even focus­sing on con­sist­ency with long-term goals can­’t hurt.

Upselling Considered Harmful

I hate being upsold. Do it to me too much and I will nev­er vis­it your estab­lish­ment again.

I hate being upsold. Rel­ev­ant upselling (I’m buy­ing a wash­ing machine, the per­son says “this soap powder is spe­cially designed to work with this style of wash­ing machine”) is one thing. Irrel­ev­ant upselling, or upselling that takes more than one sen­tence just annoys me. 

The latest example was, I call my bank about some­thing this morn­ing. We fin­ish that trans­ac­tion, I’m ready to get back to work, when the woman starts talk­ing to me about who my long-dis­tance phone pro­vider is and telling me about their offer­ings! This was­n’t rel­ev­ant to the pre­vi­ous trans­ac­tion, she did­n’t ask if it was a good time, and she did­n’t even both­er with the hitherto-oblig­at­ory “is there any­thing else I can do for you today” which used to be the stand­ard clos­ing formula. 

Hairdress­ers (and the beauty busi­ness in gen­er­al) are par­tic­u­larly prone to this; I just don’t go back to estab­lish­ments that upsell too hard.

More Amusing Spam

Some amus­ing email spam (with the idea of tak­ing your fun where you can find it).

One of the recent spams arrived as a dual text/HTML mes­sage. Pegas­us duti­fully showed me the text ver­sion (one click to the HTML ver­sion, should you wish it), which ran

Your mail­er do not sup­port HTML mes­sages. Switch to a bet­ter mailer. 

Ah, the sense of des­per­a­tion on the part of the per­son writ­ing that! The idea that someone might not be able to click on the link to dir­ectly buy whatever it is they’re selling! Of course for me, ped­ant that I am, the top­per was the bad gram­mar. If only all spam were so amusing.