Category: Idiots

World’s dumbest phishers

~ Inquisitor

X-Spam-Status: No, score=4.6 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_40,HTML_50_60, HTML_MESSAGE,HTML_MIME_NO_HTML_TAG,MIME_HTML_ONLY,REPLY_TO_EMPTY autolearn=no version=3.1.7
Subject: Ensure The Integriety Of Your Online Banking
From: Royal Bank Of Scotland <digitalbanking@rbs.co.uk>
Banking Online with Bank Of Scotland is about to become even more secure!As a valued Bank Of Scotland and Halifax Bank customer, the security of your identity and personal account information is extremely important. We are installing Enhance Online Security as an additional way of protecting your Bank Of Scotland online access.

Yes – a Bank of Scotland phishing email that claims to be sent by RBS. I got one from obviously the same gang with an HSBC “from” line and NatWest graphics. I love phishers that make spelling errors – it should hopefully mean that they don’t get that many marks.

Sent from an obviously hacked freenix box (“ftp” user on a web server) in South Africa. Phishing site on another similar hacked box in Argentina. Can people just upgrade their systems already?

Just as a matter of amusement…

~ Inquisitor

Here is the autoresponse I received for my complaint about the BBC cutting short the Spinal Tap and Metallica sets at Live Earth (but leaving James Blunt’s untouched.)

Thank you for your e-mail.

We recognise that some viewers of the ‘Live Earth’ concert were annoyed that the sets by Metallica and Spinal Tap were not shown in full.

We were keen to show elements of all concerts from around the world and took editorial decisions in advance and on the day, about the times and places we would do that.

The concerts were very fluid in London and around the world and there was certainly no prejudice about heavy metal music or any other music; just a determination to do the best for the entire audience watching on BBC TWO and One during the day. This is inevitably a fine balance and we cannot please everyone all of the time. However, we of course apologise if any particular viewers were disappointed.

Please be assured that your comments have been fully registered and added to our daily audience log. This is an internal document that is made available to the web production teams and senior BBC management.

Thank you again for taking the time to contact the BBC.

The thing is, they’d already shown the Rihanna clip they played over the Spinal Tap all-bass “Big Bottom” in between a few artists earlier on that day, and a few of the many terrible pause-ridden between-act interviews could have used Crowded House being played over them. Plus, they had hours of time to use for that sort of thing during all the delays in the US gig. And it’s odd that they only did it to the acts that were actually popular and whose appearance was special, isn’t it?

They should have shown the full London gig. No interruptions, no zero-information interviews. Clips from other concerts and/or the short films in between bands. No excuses.

[edited: aargh, late-night unspotted malapropisms. Corrected.]

Metallica fans may wish…

~ Inquisitor ~ 2 Comments

…to complain to the BBC about BBC1 cutting off Enter Sandman from Live Earth to instead play Katie Melua and Crowded House from other LE gigs.

Spinal Tap fans may also wish to put in a complaint here – they’ve cut one song from the end here to bloody Rihanna and interactive isn’t working on Telewest. It’s not like there isn’t enough time, really.

An open letter to Virgin Media

~ Inquisitor ~ 5 Comments

A complaint letter I sent recently, posted without comment.

I have been a Telewest customer since August 2003. I’ve had pretty much the same package ever since then – now branded TV L/broadband L/phone M. I was very happy with Telewest’s service quality and the breadth of the service.

Since the takeover by ntl and the rebranding as Virgin Media, I have been experiencing a number of issues:

1. The complete inability to supply what was a previously excellent 4Mbit broadband connection between January and April 2007. This was apparently due to an overloaded UBR, causing slowing even at off-peak times to 300Kbit/s and below – making sites such as youtube completely unusable. Upload speed, on the other hand, was perfectly fine (and exceeded download speed a lot of the time).

The fact that there seemed to be a complete lack of updates on this major fault internally – your helpful newsgroup support were continually only able to tell me that the repair was in “planning” and couldn’t find out any more than that – was the largest annoyance here. My broadband connection is very important to me, much more than any of the other services I take from VM, and it was simply not worthy of the £25/month I paid for it – especially since in my area competition from local loop unbundled services (eg. Be Unlimited or Sky) is just a call to BT away.

2. The reorganisation of the TV packages. I am not someone who complained about the loss of Sky One; as a matter of fact, the way VM dealt with the loss of Sky One had my full support and may well have prevented me from cancelling due to the broadband fault. However, I have been irritated by the recent, unheralded and unwarned of change to the TV L package that has seen the removal of MTV Hits, The Box and VH1 Classic and their replacement with MTV UK and VH1. I accept that these are “better” brand names for a TV package, but this brings the number of channels that show music videos without filling half the screen with opaque junk or relying on useless celebrity programming to zero (from one: VH1 Classic). With the price rise in TV L, the gain of just one channel (Bloomberg, which doesn’t interest me) and the fact that certain channels which are free to air on satellite are only on the XL package on VM (Zone Horror, for example) I’m finding this very hard to take.

3. While I do appreciate the free weekend calls on basic telephone line rental, per-minute billing is intrinsically unfair. Switching back from the fairer per-second billing has been another annoyance, especially since it was hidden on the small print of the flyer.

4. The introduction of bandwidth shaping on broadband services: I don’t disagree with the need for curbing heavy users on what is after all a shared connection, I just disagree with the fact that no-one has actually been told about it. Sure, the newsgroups know and it’s all over the user support websites, but I haven’t received any email telling me about this major change in my broadband service’s provision from unlimited 4Mbit to unlimited 4Mbit between midnight and 4pm, and I feel that it is entirely unacceptable that only those who read the newsgroups or support forums know about it.

5. The special deals being given to customers who complain about the loss of Sky One are particularly irritating right now. This is it in a nutshell: there are forum threads pretty much everywhere on the net right now encouraging people to call into VM, complain about the loss of Sky One (which, of course, they don’t really care about, otherwise they’d already have Sky) and get a better deal.

There are people getting L broadband/XL TV/L phone for £35/mo – this apparently exists as an internal designation called “package 9”. I’m paying £47.50/mo for L/L/M, and £12.50/mo is a considerable amount of money for me to be paying more for an inferior service. If you’re going to give deals to people, don’t hide them – give them to everyone. Personally I would be very happy with this, but I’m not sure how long I’m going to be in a VM area (my university course is finishing soon) and do not want to be tied down to a 12-month contract that I might not be able to keep to.

6. Your email support web form (at http://help2.virginmedia.com/assets/html/
customer_feedback/customer_feedback_querytype_2.html) only accepts a certain number of characters in a message. This of course is mentioned nowhere on the web form itself and the textbox accepts many more; thus when trying to send this letter electronically I received an autoreply telling me that “due to a technical issue we only received part of your email”. Since you do not provide a real email address for receiving customer messages, this has forced me into sending this by postal mail. Providing an actual email address read by people would be the best option here, but please at least fix this problem.

(From the two days late auto-responses I’ve been getting to my cut off complaints it appears to strip line spaces from the text as well, which would have made this letter unreadable in any case.)

7. The most recent irritation, however, has been the emailed announcement about the change to broadband technical support services from free (through 150) to a 25p/minute premium rate number. Even considering that you will not be allowed to put people on hold, the various calls I made to you over issues that were entirely your fault in the early part of this year would have made about £10+ in extra income if they were charged for in this way – the time taken up by various computer rebooting, etc., despite the fact that it was the equipment provided by Telewest that obviously was not working.

Your competition in my area and in most other cable areas, Be Unlimited ADSL2+, has a freephone support service. Sky has an 0870 number. Premium rate support is simply unacceptable ethically; I am not going to pay 25p/minute for issues which are your fault. If this policy stays I am afraid that, despite everything, I will have to cancel service.

8. In a sense then the main problem I am having with VM that I didn’t have with Telewest is the lack of information. Faults are in planning for months, TV packages are changed without any warning, broadband packages are changed without warning, “package 9” only is known about through hearsay, the entire way my phone is charged was changed in the small print, and then when you try to complain the email web form silently cuts off most of your message. When Telewest did things like that they sent letters or emails, or at least gave slightly more information than “it’s in planning” when you asked them why. I’ve never had a fault that lasted more than 24 hours before the takeover. And support for their products was always free.

What I would like, therefore is for my service to improve back to the level it was for my first three and a half years as a customer. If you can’t do that, then I and others like me will be forced into alternatives, and I really don’t want to have to do that; while I’ve got too much of an ethical conviction to go to Sky (or lie to you that I want to go there), these don’t apply to BT and ADSL2+ LLU. I know how good my service can be. Can you get it back?

A spectacular own goal

~ Inquisitor ~ 2 Comments

I’ve just received an email from Virgin Media:

Hello,

From 1st July, our broadband helpline number is changing and from then on it’ll cost 25p per minute to call from a Virgin home phone, plus 10p to connect. Mobiles and other networks may vary. The new number is 0906 212 1111.

That’s “0906” as in “scam”.

Access to technical support, at least on the ex-Telewest side, has always been

  • 0845 local rate for those with a BT line
  • free (through 150) for those with a Telewest line

After July 1, this is no longer the case – customer services on 150 will give you the 0906 number if you have any trouble with your line (or, as has been the case with all my dealings with ex-Telewest tech support, they have a problem they refuse to recognise and/or their equipment has become faulty.) With the standard “reboot your modem, reboot your computer, repeat that the connect light on the modem is not on numerous times to the minimum-wage checklist operative on the other end until they finally get that the modem isn’t getting a signal from the UBR and it’s not your computer” routine that VM’s call centre staff follow, at 25p/min they’ll probably earn about £5 a call. Hopefully the broadband support USENET groups will continue to exist, and they’re certainly better than any of VM’s call centre staff, but with the cost-cutting they’ve been doing I’m not so sure.

Last I remember, not even the ex-NTL people got screwed with a premium rate support number. At least putting people on hold is banned under the premium rate regulations, but having your only recourse for support being an 0906 number is unacceptable under any circumstances – it is anti-consumer, it is an added cost on top of the already overpriced £25/month I am paying for 4Mbit/384K, it is an imbecilic idea thought up by someone who wants to make even more money out of people with real problems instead of caring about fixing them. Telewest already had a line (at a staggering £1/min) for people with spyware problems and other issues not covered by the broadband support service, so the explanation in the FAQ about cost saving does not hold water.

All this is going to do is annoy long-serving customers like me. I’ve already been annoyed quite a bit by VM in recent months; the swapping out of the only good music channel at TV L for MTV and VH1, the major speed issue I and everyone else in my region of Edinburgh suffered between January and April, the small-print switch from per-second to per-minute call billing, the special deals given to those who whine about the loss of Sky One on the cancellations line, the fact that VM only accept email support through a webform that cuts off after a tiny number of characters, and the fact that they still haven’t admitted anything about the speed limiter (which I actually agree with to an extent) to customers in email. At least they sent out a message warning of this.

VM have to be very careful – the local-loop unbundled providers are setting up in cable areas for a reason, because unless VM stop thinking like the penny-pinching NTL of old and start acting the way Richard Branson obviously wants them to instead of just throwing red paint over the infrastructure they stand a real danger of a customer exodus to BT, Freeview or Sky and ADSL2+ LLU. I’m already sizing up the cost of getting an aerial fitted.

I have been a Telewest customer since August 2003. I’ve had the same package all the time, and been very satisfied with it. I never had any serious problems with the service until after the NTL takeover. Now, with this change in the customer support system, they are simply being outclassed by their competition: Sky have 0870 support. Be Unlimited are freephone (0808) and, right now, very technically proficient. They are the competition here. I have a moral objection to Murdoch and Sky, but none to O2 (owners of Be). I even have a BT master box in my flat just ready to re-enable.

The change in the support structure says, quite simply, both that they think we’re all stupid and that the company is desperate for money: this is not a company that I wish to be paying £45/month to. A sad end for what for a long time was the best broadband provider anywhere in the country, is forthcoming I feel unless Richard Branson can force the banks that really own the company to get their act together. I’m not sure that even he can manage that, unfortunately, so it might soon be goodbye.

Madeline McCann: Maybe the police weren’t 100% there after all…

~ Inquisitor

Now discussions about the Madeline McCann case (not Maddy – it’s a media infantilisation along the lines of “Jamie” Bulger, she wasn’t Maddy and he was always James) have a tendency to drift towards the heartless and so I’ve avoided putting my two cents in to avoid it rubbing off; however the latest news article from the Guardian on the latest rather downbeat turn in the investigation has a little bit near the end which really rather surprised me.

It is not the first time Portuguese police have searched an area following a tip off. It is understood their last search was carried out following contact with a psychic medium in America.

Read that again, because it’s truly incredible that police would at all put any trust in any evidence gained from that sort of source…

…a psychic medium in America.

No wonder they haven’t found anything yet then. Was it Allison DuBois?

Oh, come on

~ Inquisitor ~ 4 Comments

Now I’ve bashed the PS3 as much as anyone, but finally here we have something that Sony doesn’t deserve to be blamed for:

Cathedral row over computer game (BBC News, 9th June 2007)

The Church of England is considering legal action against entertainment firm Sony for featuring Manchester Cathedral in a violent Playstation computer game.

The Church says Sony did not obtain permission to use the interior in the war game Resistance: Fall of Man.

No, and nor should they have.

The game is an apparently flawed, war-based FPS set in an alternate (that is, not real) 1950s where what are either aliens or a biological experiment gone wrong are invading the West, spreading virally. Let’s emphasise that this is not real. Since your objective is to win the war, using ground-based resistance tactics, this of course means that you battle in real-world locations like churches, just like in every other war. That’s what war is.

And forgetting this context, they then make a very horrible comparison:

The Bishop of Manchester, the Rt Revd Nigel McCulloch, described the decision to feature the city’s cathedral as “highly irresponsible” – especially in the light of Manchester’s history of gun crime.

“It is well known that Manchester has a gun crime problem,” he said.

“For a global manufacturer to re-create one of our great cathedrals with photo-realistic quality and then encourage people to have guns battles in the building is beyond belief and highly irresponsible.

For a start, Sony didn’t write Resistance – it was developed by Insomniac Games, the people who came up with Spyro the Dragon, and merely distributed by Sony on their console. Secondly, it’s from what I hear not actually a recreation of the cathedral – it’s a model whose outside look is based on it but internally is fairly different (unsurprisingly, as it’s being destroyed by the enemy when you turn up). And, most importantly, exactly what the hell has Manchester’s gun crime problem got to do with a fantasy game set in an alternate 1950s where you play a resistance member fighting a last-ditch battle against an alien invader?

If Resistance was the British-set equivalent of the 50 Cent game they might have a point, but it’s not and the press should be ashamed at this comparison. It is not encouraging street crime, it is fantasy. Churches are fine to be used offensively in all other media – only a few weeks ago, Doctor Who’s “Lazarus Experiment” episode featured a denouement set in a cathedral, and I didn’t hear any of this lot complaining then – so why not much the same thing in a game?

And besides, they don’t have a leg to stand on over the image issue anyway, legally; buildings are there. It would be like the New York tourism department raising hell because I put a destroyed Statue of Liberty in a counter-terrorism game which, as per Deus Ex, they didn’t do. Hell, it would be much the same as a church complaining about the type of church-based deathmatch level that’s turned up in pretty much every World War II FPS ever made (I played it a lot in one of the variants of Medal of Honour), but they don’t.

Note also that this game has been out since November – it was a PS3 launch title, and as a result sold well because amongst the launch titles only it and Motorstorm were in any way decent (they’ve now been joined by Oblivion, but that’s still pretty much it if you don’t count PS2 games) – and the controversy has only started now. Have the gutter press got tired of Big Brother already?

Hidden in the Celebrity Big Brother transcripts…

~ Inquisitor ~ 3 Comments

…is a gem. (26-page PDF, courtesy the Guardian.)

To summarise: Jade and her just-as-thick brother [Ed: AAARGH, mental classification screwup] boyfriend, Jack Tweed, Jo S Club and Danielle Lloyd played a very childish party game of “make up limericks about Shilpa” which involved trying to avoid a word that apparently rhymed with “tacky” and began with the letter P. Mostly it’s just as dull as Big Brother’s always been, but the interesting bit is how (a) none of this got to air and (b) the details of how Channel Four tried to cover it up.

Oddly, the game itself is not included in the transcript [Ed: wrote this before I realised it was on p5 and forgot to remove it, grr], but two of the warning interviews are: the one I’m interested in is the one with Jade’s brother bf:

Saturday 20th January 2007 approx. 20:20 – DIARY ROOM WITH JACK TWEED (p.18-26)

Jack: Hello.
Big Brother: Hello, Jack.
Jack: Hello.
Big Brother: Jack, please could you switch off your microphone and take the battery out, please? You should know that you are still being recorded.
Jack: Done
Big Brother: Thanks.

[…]

Big Brother: You were using rhyming slang to replace what you called ‘the “P” word’.
Jack: Okay.
Big Brother: You said the word rhymed with ‘tacky’.
Jack: Okay
Big Brother: It is clear to Big Brother, Jack, that this was a reference to the racial insult ‘Paki’.
Jack: Okay.
Big Brother: Do you understand that this is considered racially offensive language?
Jack: Yeah, okay.
Big Brother: What do you have to say about this, Jack?
Jack: I was explaining the word that someone that was meant to have rhymed with the word. I
wasn’t actually saying the word.
Big Brother: Do you mean you were trying to include the word in the limerick but were using another
word to replace it?
Jack: I can’t really remember what exactly happened but I think… that someone said ‘I know a word that rhymes with that’ and then I clocked on to what it was and then explained what the word was, but didn’t actually say the word.

Genius.

There then entails a long series of questions determining where they were playing the game, and then on p22…

Big Brother: Jack, do you understand that the ‘P’ word – Paki –
Jack: Yeah.
Big Brother: Is considered to be racist?
Jack: Yeah, I fully understand.
Big Brother: And that simply by replacing the word with a word that rhymes with it doesn’t take away from the racial insult?
Jack: I wasn’t saying it to anyone. I was explaining what the word… what the word is. That’s why, in a conversation, you’re allowed to say, ‘The word “Paki” is a racist remark’. That’s why you’re allowed to say it. So I wasn’t saying, ‘That girl is a Paki’; I was saying ‘the word is that’.

Oh, I’m sure. These people are just as appalling on paper as they are in real life, aren’t they?

What’s really interesting about this is the style of the questioning. This interview is asking very short, simple, almost primary-school level questions, whereas the questioning of Jo S Club is much more detailed and inquiring (and she gives better game, too.) Is this an assumption that Big Brother is making directly of the Goody/Tweed family, almost talking down to them in much the same way they seem to think Shilpa was talking down to them?

Big Brother: Jack, was the limerick about Shilpa?
Jack: I think… I really can’t remember. I think so. I don’t know.
Big Brother: Jack, Big Brother is going to remind you of the limerick.
Jack: Okay.
Big Brother: Jo began: ‘There once was a house that was happy’. You then said: ‘Until…’ Jo said: ‘And then there entered…’ Cleo then interrupted and said, ‘You are all going to [Big Brother] prison’.

That’s actually a brilliant one-liner – the conversation in question is on p5-6 if you’re interested. Excellent timing from Cleo Rocos there. Watch out for Jack’s grammatical howler:

Jack: Yeah. So that wasn’t referring to the word ‘Paki’. That was just people who was tacky.
Big Brother: Jack, in a previous conversation, you had substituted the word ‘tacky’ for the word ‘Paki’.
Jack: In that limerick just then, I wasn’t at all suggesting that the word was meant to be ‘Paki’. I was saying tacky, as in tacky people. I wasn’t – not at all.

He’s got a bit of a cheek calling Shilpa Shetty tacky considering exactly how tacky the Goody/Tweed family are – Jade herself spent a lot of the time before stupidly deciding to go on BB again making low-rent, truly dreadful reality programming for LivingTV (“Britain’s Most Popular CSI Repeats And Psychic Bullshit Channel”) with titles like “Jade’s Salon” and “Jade’s PA”. Making exploitative reality TV that no-one watches has to qualify as tacky even by their perspective, surely?

Big Brother: Jack, do you understand that some people may consider what you said to be racially offensive?
Jack: Yeah, some people who got the wrong end of the stick, I would, yeah. Can I just ask: is this… What, is this out in the paper, because if it is, I’d rather just leave now.

And Jack gets pretty much straight to the heart of the matter here, which is really quite surprising. Big Brother is tiptoeing around the issue but this is the only reason he’s being questioned about it – because news of the “Shilpa Poppadom” incident had already got out and C4 was worrying that this would get out too.

(In fact – although this is from memory, not my email archive so could be unreliable – news had got out through the usual Popbitch-type channels that Channel Four had material showing Jade et al making racist comments and had covered it up. Because it was from Popbitch et al, it wasn’t taken seriously. Now, of course, we know that this was true.)

Big Brother: Jack, as a result of this incident, Big Brother is now issuing you with your first and only formal warning about this.
Jack: Okay.
Big Brother: Any further incidents could result in your immediate eviction.
Jack: Okay. Could I just… Can you just please tell me if this is out in the paper or anything like that, if anything’s out there suggesting, because if it is, I’d rather just leave now.

At least he realises he’s made a major boner and wants to stop making them – which is more than can be said for a lot of people.

Big Brother: Jack, just listen for a second.
Jack: Okay.
Big Brother: Big Brother would ask that you exercise some care in the future with your language.
Jack: Yeah.
Big Brother: And Big Brother would like to remind you that, as always, all diary room conversations between Big Brother and housemates are confidential.
Jack: Okay.
Big Brother: Do you understand?
Jack: Yeah. Thank you.

The implication here of course is “don’t speak about this ever again and you’ll be fine.”

What this transcript shows is that all along C4 had the power to control the events on BB, editing out this limerick incident (which happened at around half eleven on the 16th of January, the same day as the cooking incident that triggered the press furore) from even the E4 live transmission and similarly keeping the official reprimand out of public view. Very interesting in its own way to watch how they were all manipulated for the camera – so much for BB reflecting real life then.

The sponsors for this season by the way? Virgin Media. My cable company. Who, through their ownership of Living TV, make all that psychic bullshit and Jade-featuring reality shows (although of course they don’t feature Jade anymore, they’ve got Pete Burns in instead.) Aaargh, not impressed – with that and the service I’m getting, I think I might soon be giving BT a call.

Sent to my university email box…

~ Inquisitor ~ 3 Comments

A customised “scholarship award” 419 scam! Let’s deconstruct it, shall we…

FROM: THE DESK OF THE VICE PRESIDENT MR.AUSTIN THOMAS.(TRANSNATIONAL
AWARD INTERNATIONAL) PRIZE AWARD DEPT.
REF NO: 12/0078/IPG
BATCH NO: EGS/ 20054117/08

Generated randomly, probably.

ATTN: WINNER.

RE: SCHOLARSHIP AWARD NOTIFICATION, FINAL NOTICE.

We are pleased to inform you, that as a result of our RECENT LOTTERY DRAWS HELD ON THE 28TH DECEMBER 2006. Your e-mail address attached to ticket number:021-7276083-04 with serial number:31270-0 drew lucky numbers:05-06-12-14-38 which consequently won in the 5th category. You have therefore been approved for a lump sum pay of (FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND US DOLLARS) in cash credited to file with REF:.EGS/3662367114/13

Oh, look, is that a different random batch number? Note the amateurish nature of the scam. I’m amazed anyone gets taken in by these things, but they do.

Note that all participants in this lottery program have been selected randomly through a computer ballot system drawn from over 20,000 Officials and 30,000,000 individual email addresses from all search engines and web sites,from Asia, Australia, NewZealand, Europe, North and South America, Middle East and Africa, as part of our International Promotions Program.This promotional program takes place every year, and is promoted and sponsored by eminent personalities like the Sultan of Brunei and other corporate organizations. This is to IMPROVE THE LEVEL O!
F EDUCATION WORLDWIDE and to ENCOURAGE THE USE OF INTERNET AND COMPUTERS WORLDWIDE.

“30,000,000 individual email addresses” obviously means “dictionary attack on .edu and .ac.uk”. This appears to be a fill-in-the-blank lotto scam – with the reasons for it just entered in by the scammer in particular depending on his run. Also, that O!<carriage return>F is in the actual email. Brilliant.

Your fund is now deposited with EcoBank and insured in your name For security purpose and clarity, we advise that you keep your winning information confidential until your claims have been processed and your money remitted to your account.

Nah, I don’t think I’m going to do that.

This is part of our security protocol to avoid double claims and unwarranted abuse of this program by some participants. We look forward to your active participation in our next 4 million dollars slot.

This of course is the hook for the scam – there’s 4M available if you phone in. Shame the scam’s so bloody obvious, and the hook is too well hidden in the long paragraphs.

To begin the processing of your prize you are to contact your claims agent through our accredited Prize Transfer agents as stated below:

Name..Rev Paul Edward

Oh, a “reverend”. How trustworthy.

TEL: +234-80-3819 1724 CALL HIM IMMEDIATELY WITH HIS ABOVE DIRECT PHONE NUMBER IF YOU ARE CALLING FROM (USA) THIS IS HOW YOU DIAL 011-234-80-3819 1724 BUT IF YOU ARE CALLING FROM ANY OTHER COUNTRY,THIS IS HOW TO DIAL +234-80-3819 1724

They obviously think we’re that dumb that we don’t know how to dial an international number. Oh, and +234 is, of course, the international calling code for Nigeria; it is a mobile phone on the MTN Nigeria network.

Googling on the telephone number for the scammer has cropped up someone on Livejournal who’s received the scam from the same people; the name given in his scam email is “Rev Frank Ive”.

You are also advised to provide your claim agent with the under listed information as soon as possible send it to his two email addresses below,YOUR CLAIM AGENT E MAIL ADDRESSES BELOW,

E MAIL: pauledward1616@yahoo.com
E MAIL: pauledward555@myway.com

The same email providers were used for Frank Ive, presumably because these are the easiest free email providers to automate account creation for (and slowest to terminate people for 419 scamming.)

1. Name in full
2. Address
3. Nationality
4. Age
5. Occupation
6. Phone/Fax
7. Batch Number
8. Serial Number

All winnings must be claimed not later than one month after the date of this notice. Please note,in order to avoid unnecessary delays and complications,remember to quote your Batch number and Serial numbers in all orrespondence.Furthermore,should there be any change of address do inform our agent as soon as possible.Congratulations!!!once more and thank you for being part of our promotional program. Bear in mind that 10% of your fund will be going to the lottery organization that played the lottery with peoples name and email addresses that should be after you most have received the fund in your account,the 10% would have been given to them,just because the fund has been insured and will not be removed till you receive the fund in your account.

This of course is the trick to confuse people into not reporting their scamming until it’s way, way too late. Oh, and “orrespondence”? Tee hee.

Sincerely,

MR.AUSTIN THOMAS
VICE PRESIDENT.
TRANSNATIONAL AWARD

The same name was used on the Livejournal recipient’s mail too.

So what we’ve got here is a scam that is cleverly targeted but still misses the mark by a very long distance, not least because it got picked up by my university’s SpamAssassin system and was marked with a spam warning, but also because of what it lacks in spelling, grammar, good sense and layout. The question of course is why so many people get stung by 419 scams after this long and why they are allowed to just keep on going. It’s the money, isn’t it?

Eurovision 2007 – “we deserved nul points” edition

~ Inquisitor

But sadly Ireland (7pts) and Malta (the full twelve) rescued Scooch from total ignominy. Of course, we didn’t give Ireland any points in return so I bet they’re regretting that now.

We had the worst song. Even that Ukrainian drag act, the French’s inexplicable Parisian routine and the Latvian’s Il Divo clone were better than ours. Only the Irish stereotype number dragged itself to our level. Sure, Cyndi wouldn’t have won either, but we’d probably have ended up closer to mid table. (Much as it pains me to say it, the Big Brovaz number would probably have done best out of our lot – generoballads didn’t do well this year.)

This was my Twitter reaction when watching:

  • 21:21:26: Much as it it pains me to say this, this is our entry: Scooch, with “Flying The Flag (For You)”.
  • 21:22:34: At least they’re in tune. They’ve never managed it before.
  • 21:23:15: They’ve kept the godawful salted-nuts type puns in, which are *dreadful*.
  • 21:24:12: Oh God. “Pleasurable journey” with crotch movements. Why couldn’t this not have been our entry?
  • 21:24:45: And here it comes, the worst pun of all – “suck on for landing”. NUL… POINTS! NUL… POINTS!

It was a poor joke to begin with, and the godawful tuneless “would you like something to suck on?” bits sealed it; people just ended up confused about what they were watching. What was worse was that it didn’t have a tune – to pick up those Europeans who don’t understand English innuendo (like Lithuania’s “We Are The Winners Of Eurovision” song did last year – it ended up coming sixth). They grated in Making Your Mind Up, and I thought they were awful then; this was magnified when I saw clips of their out-of-tune rehearsals on news programmes and boosted to all new levels when I saw the final performance.

Peter Sissons on News 24 had to try and keep his obvious dislike of the song and disbelief that it was our entry out of his speech pattern when introducing the pre-contest reports; he failed miserably. He wasn’t the only one – Wogan at one point pointed out that “we deserve to come bottom four”, whilst complaining about “bloc voting”.

In fact, what’s interesting is that we’ve had eleven different winners for eleven contests since 1996 and telephone voting: including us (1997), Ireland (1996), Sweden (1999), Denmark (2000), Greece (2005) and Finland (2006) – all of which at least “think” Western Europe. That pretty much in itself disproves the Eastern Bloc voting theory – they may well all vote for each other, but that’s because they like the same sort of music and, what’s more, it’s not enough to win.

What wins is a song that people like. People liked Lordi. People liked the Serbian song this year: and, let’s face it, her song winning completely disproves the theory that people vote for Eurovision entries based on style. And the Ukrainian entry outdid us on comedy value – it actually felt hand-wrought and endearingly batty, while the Scooch song just felt like it was built on a camp assembly line. One of the men in the ‘band’ is a presenter on one of those Quiz Scam channels to pay the bills, and it’s that personality that came off the screen – made to a template of smarm.

People hated Scooch, hated Daz Sampson and hated everything we’ve put in since Katrina and the Waves. And I think it’s because they know that by putting that kind of entry in Eurovision, we’re patronising them – we think of Eurovision entries as if it was 1997, not 2007. They might not be very good at English lyrics but they have the same slick pop production values as us – if the Pet Shop Boys or Xenomania or Richard X were to produce a number for a Eurovision contender this year, they might at least have a chance. Hell, we should just get Robbie Williams to enter, he’s our most well known pop star on the Continent.

But this year’s Making Your Mind Up consisted entirely of washed-up failures and people who shouldn’t have been there – we’re looking third rate, but Eurovision demands first rate now (or at least a decent ripoff of first rate). It needs to change. Let’s have an entry we can be proud of for 2008 – we deserve one.