New Hampshire Real Estate & Consumer Resources

Archive for October, 2006

It’s been a while since I have posted any information regarding e-mail scams. Frankly, I just got a bit sick of the same old scams arriving in my inbox all the time and I shut off the e-mail account that was attracting most of it.

Just today one of my other e-mail accounts picked up a scam message of the type I have not seen that often. This one is from someone claiming to be representing “A.H.A. International.” Here is the message I received:

From:     A.H.A INTERNATIONAL CO., LTD [aha005@rediffmail.com]
To:         Undisclosed-Recipient:;
Subject:  CAN YOU WORK FOR A.H.A INT’L?

30 OCTOBER, 2006.

Dear sir/madam

We hereby introduce A.H.A INTERNATIONAL CO.,LTD,an international export/import company deals principally on Pharmaceuticals & Medical Products,Rubber and Plastic Products,Electrical Products Light Industrial Products,Hardware,Metals and Mineral Products,Textile and Garments,Auto Parts & Accessories and export into the Canada/America and Europe,Its turnover in 2004 reached US$192,000,000

We are searching for agents who can help us establish a medium of getting to our customers in the Canada/America and other nearby countries as well as making payments through you to us. You do not have to leave your present job for this one because this job offer will be on a part time basis as it comes once in a while and remuneration is on a percentage basis of 10% of the total amount you receive from our customers at any time on our behalf.

A.H.A has built up business relationships with more than 56 countries and regions around the world, forming both a global network of information, distribution and services and a pattern of diversified marketing across the five continents. Protected by laws, the insignia of A.H.A and trademarks of the products related have been registered in a great number of countries and regions.

Please contact us for more information,Subject to your satisfaction you will be given the opportunity to negotiate your mode of which we will pay for your services as our representative in Canada/America and Europe. Now we already have customers who are ready to remit cash to us.

Please to facilitate the conclusion of this transaction if accepted,do send us promptly the following information below:

FULL_NAME:
COMPANY_NAME:
AGE_:
GENDER_:
MAILING_ADDRESS:
STATE_CITY_ZIP:
CONTACT_PHONE:
CONTACT_FAX:
CONTACT_EMAIL:
OCCUPATION_:
SUBMIT_:

Thanks In advance.
ziu cheng
Managing Director.
A.H.A INTERNATIONAL CO.,LTD.
Sha Tin, New Territories
Hong Kong
Tele\Fax:+852-301-59699

From what I have heard regarding messages like this is that they are simply scammers who try to fool you with bad checks. Or, in some cases, it is possible that they might actually be offering you a real job. Don’t get too excited, I’ll elaborate on that in a minute!

In the first type of scam, the scammers try to get you to believe that you will simply be transferring money for them. They will claim that due to the circumstances of their business, they need people in your country to simply accept money and then transfer it to others while keeping a percentage for yourself as your compensation.

The next phase of the scam begins when they send you a phoney check to deposit in your bank account and then transfer the amount of the check to someone else while keeping your percentage.

The problem arises when the bank discovers that the check is a phoney and if they don’t catch it before the check is cleared and you have sent the money to fulfill your part of the agreement, you are in serious trouble.

The other possibility with scams of this nature is that it may be a real job you are being offered. However, and this is a big however, you are being hired by a criminal enterprise, and as such, I suspect you could find yourself in a lot of trouble in the long run.

There are various overseas criminal organizations that make money in this country through illegal means. One of their big problems is getting their illegal profits out of this country and into their hands.

One of their solutions was to work out various schemes which involve hiring people here in the U.S. to transfer this money overseas to the criminals. Definitely something you don’t want to be involved with!

The best policy is to simply delete any e-mail messages you get that talk about any kind of job that involves the transfer of money. These types of messages are extraordinarily likely to be scams or criminals looking to hire people for illegal purposes.

If you think about it, what are the odds that some random person overseas is going to send you an e-mail message with the offer of an actual, legitimate job opportunity? About the same as some stranger handing you a $100 bill when you are walking down the street, I suspect.

Here’s another good example of why it pays to shop around. I was quite amazed to see how much I was able to save on auto insurance by switching to another company,

With my oldest son newly licensed this year, I was warned by my insurance agent that the we would be paying more for our auto insurance. This wasn’t terribly surprising since his car was added to our policy earlier this year and he was driving it back and forth to his summer job.

What I did not know, was that even if he was not driving and did not have a car on the road, our premium would still go up simply because he has a driver’s license and happens to live here with us.

With school back in session and his car no longer registered and not on the road, I was a bit surprised to get a bill from the insurance company that was about $800 higher than the previous year.

I should also note that our policy includes our home owner’s policy as well, since it is a combined policy. The big increase however, was on the auto portion of the policy. The homeowner’s policy, like everything else in the world, has been inching up a bit each year as well, but certainly not to the tune of $800!

Since my son’s car was no longer on the road, and the insurance company had removed it from our policy for the time being, I thought there had to be some mistake when I saw the $800 increase in our premium.

I called our agent who is right here in the same town and has always been very pleasant and helpful to deal with. She explained to me that the fact that a teenager with a driver’s license lives in our house, our premium goes up.

I explained to her that he is not currently doing any driving and will not be for a while. One of our cars is a manual transmission which he does not know how to drive and the other vehicle, my pick-up truck, is something he will definitely not be driving.

I was told that did not matter and as long as a teenage driver lived with us, the new premium would stay in place. Our only options where to throw him out of the house or have him surrender his driver’s license. Not too realistic.

This whole thing seemed ridiculous to me, but I know how insurance agencies like to minimize their risk. I suspect a tremendous amount of money is made in the insurance business and I certainly would not want to deprive any insurance company executives of their next lavish vacation or extra Mercedes for the garage after all.

A few days later I was surfing around the net and saw one of those ads for low insurance rates and free quotes, etc. Being a bit unhappy about my new premium, I decided to click on the ad and proceeded to fill out the online form for a new quote.

A day or two later I got an e-mail message from an agent up in the Laconia area who wanted to give me a quote. He got some further information from me and provided me with a quote which I was sure was a mistake.

The premium was close to what I was paying before my son got his license — about $700 less than my current insurance company was expecting me to pay. I kept expecting him to discover a mistake and tell me that the premium would actually be closer to my current policy, but he did not.

A couple of weeks later and I had my new policy in hand and the telephone in the other hand, dialing my current agent to let them know I wanted to cancel the policy.

For those that are interested, my previous company was OneBeacon based in Massachusetts and my new company is MetLife.

I never had any real problems with the previous company, but never had a claim either, so I can’t say how they performed when we needed coverage.

It was kind of amusing after my initial call to my agent because she called me back about 10 minutes later just to make sure she fully understood the numbers I gave her earlier and to be clear on why I was canceling my policy so she could tell OneBeacon why they lost our business.

It’s simple really. We’re paying for insurance because of something that “might” happen. And I don’t care who I pay that money to as long as I am not aware of any specific reason not to select that company.

If MetLife is going to save me $700 when compared to OneBeacon, you bet I am going to switch!

My previous agent kind of snickered when I told her that the MetLife agent informed me that MetLife was going after business with young drivers. She said she had seen companies do that before to drum up business and then end up having to raise rates later on.

Who knows? She may be right and I may end up paying as much to MetLife next year as OneBeacon was wanting me to pay this year.

But what I do know is that my policy for the coming year is going to cost me about $700 than my previous policy and that’s good enough for me.

I should also mention how easy it was for me to switch to another company. I exchanged a few e-mails and phone calls with the new agent who sent me out some forms to sign.

I signed the forms, scanned them into my PC and e-mailed them back to him and I had my new policy about a week later. Quite painless.

If you are unhappy with what you are paying for auto insurance, by all means, shop around a bit and see if you can get a better deal. I was quite surprised to see just how much better I was able to do.

If you want to try one of those online quote forms like I did, this one will give you five free auto insurance quotes. Click here to access the form.

Since I have eliminated most of my e-mail addresses that were receiving lots of spam, I was a bit surprised to see a new scam e-mail show up at one of my e-mail addresses.

I have heard about these lottery scams before and have even received a few of them in the past, but this one was a bit more clever than the others I have seen to date.

This one is coming from someone claiming to be “Darryn Clarke (Mrs),” who for all I know, may be an actual lottery official whose name these scammers have decided to use to add credibility to their scam.

As expected, the e-mail claims that I have won a substantial amount of money in the U.K. Lottery, and then goes on to explain that my e-mail address was selected randomly from various web sites.

That, apparently is their effort to overcome the first objection that would come to mind for most recipients of a message like this. That, of course, would be: “I didn’t enter the U.K. Lottery!”

It then goes on to make the claim that this drawing is part of the country’s effort to raise money for the Olympic Games in 2012.

The problem with that is that organizations that are trying to raise money are not in the habit of giving it away free to random individuals around the world.

A lottery manages to collect the money that is paid out to winners buy selling tickets to those who wish to participate. The key word here is selling. Without money coming in from the sale of lottery tickets, a lottery has no money to distribute to the winners. Pretty simple concept.

Despite their failed attempts to explain away a free lottery, I did find one of their tactics quite clever.

After providing me with my winning number, they provide me with a web site address so I can go there and verify that my number is indeed among the winners.

The site they directed me to appears to be a legitimate lottery web site and sure enough, my number was on the list as a winner! Imagine my excitement! Yeah, right.

I thought this was a rather clever innovation, but like most of these scams, you can see through it pretty easily when you pay attention to detail.

Beside each winning number it indicates where the winning ticket was purchased. For my winning number, it indicated that the ticket was purchased in the “Stoke-on-Trent” area, which I did not bother to look up, but is probably some region or town in the United Kingdom.

The problem is that I have never in my life visited “Stoke-on-Trent,” or any other area of the U.K. Makes it a but difficult to imagine that the unclaimed winning ticket in question is mine.

For the sake of making it easier for people to find this post, I should also mention that the e-mail address they provided to me for contact was info@national-lotto9.2-cool.co.uk, and is likely some domain that the scammers set up to appear as close to possible as a legitimate domain belonging to the U.K. Lottery.

For your amusement, here is the e-mail message as I received it (click image for larger view):

Despite all the precautions I take here to remain free of the various nasty things roaming around the net, occasionally I end up having to deal with this crap.

This time one of my kids ended up infecting his PC with a ton of ad-ware. It was placing icons on his desktop and popping up various advertisements on his screen. Since he is not the type of kid that loves tinkering with computers, he ended up telling me about it and I had to deal with the mess.

One thing that baffles the hell out of me is that how this kind of stuff could ever make a dime for any of the scumbags out there that must be profiting from this crap. What kind of moron would someone have to be to end up being bombarded with pop-up ads on their PC and actually buy something as a result? That’s the kind of stupidity I cannot even begin to comprehend, but it must be happening because these scumbags would not be doing it if they were not making money from it.

Anyway, I hauled my less-than-enthusiastic self up to my son’s room and sat down in front of his PC. A quick look confirmed that a lot of ad-ware crap had invaded his PC. He probably downloaded a free program from some website that was infected, but since he visits so many sites, he could not recall which one it may have been. Since I was interested in getting the machine cleaned up as quickly as possible, I did not care to spend a lot of time trying to figure out where he got it. These adventures consume too much time as it is.

The first thing I did was to download the latest copy of the Ultimate Boot CD and burn it to a CD. The best way to approach something like this is to use a bootable CD like this one. It’s a fabulous resource and I highly recommend it.

What makes the bootable CD so useful is that the ad-ware is not able to touch the CD. Ad-ware and other nasty programs can often spread and re-install themselves on your PC even as you are attempting to remove them. Since it is physically impossible for the PC to write to the CD, there is no way that the CD can be infected by any of the programs you are trying to remove. This gives you a “clean” environment to work from.

The Ultimate Boot CD has many useful programs included on it, including several anti-virus and anti-spyware programs which I was able to use to clean much of the ad-ware off the PC.

One key thing to remember when cleaning nasty programs off your PC is that you want to try to use as many different programs as possible. Not every program can remove every type of infection and this was certainly the case with this infection as some programs missed other problems that were picked up by others.

Something else that was confirmed for me this time was the usefulness of firewall programs. During the course of my efforts to remove all the ad-ware from my son’s PC, it was very easy for me to see that there were still infections there that none of the anti-virus or anti-spyware programs could find. Each time I would clean up some of the ad-ware and re-start the PC, the firewall would alert me about a program with a strange name that was trying to connect to another system out on the internet.

I tried quite a few of the popular and well-known tools to remove all the crap from the PC but this one program seemed quite difficult to get rid of. It seemed to be using filenames that were hidden from most normal efforts to locate it, but the firewall program would alert each and every time it tried to connect to the internet.

For those that are not familiar with firewall programs, they are similar to anti-virus programs in the way they sit quietly in the background and wait for something to happen. In this case, attempts to connect to the internet from your PC, or, from systems on the internet attempting to connect to your PC.

Most firewall programs have a “learning” function built it that allows you to tell the firewall which programs are allowed to access the internet. You simply install the firewall program and then wait for it to start alerting you to programs that are trying to communicate via the internet. Once you have informed the firewall program about all the programs on your PC that are allowed to use the internet, you should not normally see alerts from the firewall unless a new program, that it does not know about, tries to communicate via the net.

This is what makes the firewall an invaluable tool in the battle against the makers of ad-ware and other nasty programs. Another thing I should point out is that some nasty programs that are particularly nasty have functionality built into them that allows them to bypass the firewall program or actually locate the firewall program running on you PC and terminate it! Talk about scum-ware!

I have my own answer to clever programs like that which involves using an older firewall program that has not been available for quite a while. Although it is certainly not foolproof by any means, my logic is to assume that most sophisticated scum-ware that is able to bypass or terminate a firewall program is probably programmed to recognize only up-to-date, or at least fairly recent, firewall programs. It would take a massive effort to track down every firewall program from the past few years and include functionality to identify them all as part of the scum-ware program.

I’m not going to say what firewall program I am using except to reveal that it is probably at least 5 years old, is no longer available and still works just fine on the PCs in my house.

The firewall also helped my find an effective and very unexpected solution to the problem of removing the last nasty program from my son’s PC. I probably could have used one of the advanced file management programs from the Ultimate Boot CD to locate and delete the hidden program, but what I discovered with the help of the firewall program saved me a lot of time and trouble.

When the firewall program produces an alert about a program trying to communicate via the internet it provides the name and location of the program that is trying to access the internet as well as the internet IP address of the computer that the program is trying to communicate with.

Most of the time these scum-ware programs are trying to contact other computers on the internet in order to send data back to them about the web surfing habits of the PC’s owner or to grab more scum-ware programs to install.

This appeared to be the case with my son’s PC since it had at least 10 different ad-ware and trojan programs installed on it. Apparently, some of them are designed to go grab more scum-ware off the internet and install it as fast as it can.

When the firewall program alerted me to the IP address of the computer that the scum-ware program was trying to reach, I decided I would type that address into a web browser and see if I could get a site to come up. That might help me figure out who was behind this and how to get rid of it.

Sure enough, a website appeared on the screen for some low-life advertising outfit whose name escapes me now. That was not too much of a surprise, but what was surprising was a link on their page that was labeled “Uninstall.”

Hmmmmm, could this actually be a way to rid my son’s PC of the scum-ware in question? I clicked on the “Uninstall” link and was shown some instructions on how to download the uninstall program and run it to remove the scum-ware program.

I download the uninstall program and ran it on my son’s PC. It informed me that the program had been removed. I wondered if this was too good to be true. Not being too willing to trust a scum-ware purveyor, I had wondered if the “uninstall” program instead infected my son’s PC with even more scum-ware!

I re-started his PC and was surprised to see that the firewall alerts were not longer coming up on the screen. As amazing as it seemed, the scum-ware makers actually provided a way to uninstall their program. After a little investigation, I found the same to be true for one of the other scum-ware programs whose IP address I had written down a little earlier in the process.

The bottom line is that you should get yourself a firewall program and use it, if you are not doing so already. There are a few good firewall programs you can download and use for free. Just search for “free firewall” on Google or Yahoo to find one you want to try.

If you are not terribly computer-savvy, the idea of using a firewall may seem intimidating at first, but give it a try. The protection you get from it is worth learning enough about it to keep it running on your PC at all times so you will know what kinds of things may be going on behind the scenes that you might otherwise never know about.

The new BeyondWireless phone has been activated and seems to be working fine. The guy in the “porting” department called me as promised to let me know the number from the old TracFone phone has been moved to the new phone. (Bye-bye TracFone, you will not be missed!)

He also activated it for me, which saves me the trouble of doing that myself. All I had to do was use the 36-minute prepaid card they provided free with the phone to add minutes.

The process for adding minutes for this phone was a lot easier than it was for TracFone. I just had to punch in a total of about 16 or so digits and hit “call” and a few seconds later, the display informed me that my minutes had been successfully added.

The procedure with TracFone was a real pain and I used to dread it when one of the phones got close to it’s airtime expiration date because I knew I had to go to their website and sit there punching in a long series of numbers about 4 or 5 times as I followed along from one web page to the next. I don’t miss that tedium!

The phone I opted for with the new service was the cheapest one they had since we are all pretty basic cell phone users and we don’t need all kinds of fancy options. We just want to be able to make or receive a simple phone call on it once in a while.

I could be more pleased with the phone. It’s a Siemens S56 and it seems to work OK, but I don’t like the user interface. It’s not terribly intuitive and the owner’s manual is terrible.

I wish I could understand how so many owner’s manuals and “help” files end up so poorly written. Human beings have been using the written word for a very long time, you would think just about everyone could get it right by now.

I’m not talking about grammar or punctuation or spelling here. I’m talking about just wanting to find out how to do a certain thing with the phone and consulting the manual to find out how. A true exercise in frustration.

There’s no question in my mind that I could do a better job of creating documentation for these various gadgets in our lives than the morons that are currently doing it.

Anyway, I’ve had nothing but Nokia phones up until now and I much prefer them to the Siemens. Much more intuitive to use and easier to use.

After some searching for another prepaid wireless provider that would work in my area, I settled on BeyondWireless. Looks the costs will be pretty close to TracFone, maybe even a little cheaper.

I ordered the phone from their website and received it in a couple of days. Since we wanted to continue using the same phone number for my wife’s phone that she had been using with TracFone, I had to call them up and begin the process of “porting” the number from the TracFone phone to the new phone.

The good news is that I talked to two different people at BeyondWireless customer service and they both spoke excellent English, and if I’m not mistaken, were actually located somewhere in North America! Imagine my surprise!

My earlier experience being on hold for over an hour with BeyondWireless turned out to be a problem with their phone system. After e-mailing them that same day, I received a pretty prompt response advising me that they had a problem with their phone system that caused the extended wait. That appears to be true since my other two calls to them since then were both answered after a very short time on hold.

I’m now waiting for the number to be “ported” over to the new phone. This process can take a few days from what I have heard, so I will wait for the call they promised me when the number has been assigned to the new phone.

One thing interesting about the new phone is that it has a Cingular logo on it and a Cingular logo comes up on the display when the phone is turned on. I guess this outfit must be owned by them or have some other kind of relationship with them. That, however, is a good thing, since I was able to test a Cingular phone recently in our area and it seemed to provide pretty good coverage here.

In fact, I had actually wanted to sign up for Cingular service since I knew the coverage was good here, but I was not too inspired by any of the deals they had on the Cingular website.

The new phone is one that is made by Siemens which we have not had any experience with at all since all of the phones we have had up to this point have been Nokia. It will be interesting to see how this one compares.

So far, so good. If this new service works out OK for my wife, I will eventually get a BeyondWireless phone for my son and for myself as well.

[tags]Wireless Phone Service, TracFone, BeyondWireless, Cingular, Cell Phone[/tags]