I’m sick of deleting SPAM messages that automatic spambots are putting here.
To stop this, comments have now been disabled until we can prevent the SPAM from happening

Another case of a few ratbags stuffing up something that could be really useful.

We’ve received yet another online “Job Offer” letter, this time pretending to be from Credit Suisse.

It promises jobs in international finance - and offers a 2 week training course.

Of course, it’s a scam. They are looking for suckers to process money that has been stolen from people who provided their bank account details in response to fake letters that appear to come from their financial institutions. The common term for these people are “mules”.

It works like this:
1. Company offers “job opportunity”
2. Naive Person accepts, and signs up, providing their bank account details
3. Company steals money from accounts of Phishing victims, and transfers it to Naive person’s account
4. Naive person transfers money (less commission) to Company’s account
5. Police come and prosecute Naive Person.

If you receive a “job offer” like this - just delete it immediately.
Don’t click on any links in it, or you may get something nasty installed onto your computer.

The BBC have published a good article about various online jobs scams at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3208703.stm

To find out more about fake email messages, please visit webangel.com.au/fakes

We received a “Job Offer” from a company called SPARTA-TRADE this morning.

It uses the name of well known Australian job site “Career One” to lull you into a false sense of security.

The email is almost certainly an attempt to recruit you into illegally laundering money through your bank account. (Either that, or it will try to install something horrible onto your computer)

Read more at WebAngel.com.au/fakes/sparta-trade.htm

A couple of particularly nasty SPAM messages are being sent around at the moment.

The “TV Shop ” one is confirmation of a non existent order for an expensive television set, and urges you to click on a link to view the progress of my “order”.

Another dangerous email is the “Postcard” message, with a subject line of “Thinking Of You”.
This one wants you to go to a website to pick up an electronic greeting card that someone has sent you.

Don’t click on the links - they will go to sites that contain dangerous Java code and Internet Explorer exploits which will install a trojan progam. This will capture your keystrokes when you visit banking sites, send them to criminals, and also allow them to take control of your PC to send out SPAM, and other nasty things.

Latest critical security updates from Microsoft (ie after 14th October( will protect you against these programs.

(Or preferably, you could use another browser like Firefox from www.getfirefox.com

For those who don’t know the term, “phishing” is practiced by criminals who trick you into going to a reputable looking website, and try to get you to put in your secret bank account details.
Soon afterwards, all the money gets cleaned out of your account.

Criminals have registered the domain name visa-secure.com in an attempt to mislead people into believing that this is a genuine bank run site. Lots of SPAM emails have been sent out to try and trick people into enter their bank account details into a fake website.
More details here:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/10/08/cardholders_targetted_by_phishing_attack_using_visasecurecom.html

We suggest that you tattoo this behind your eyelids.
Banks will NEVER contact you by email telling you that you need to validate your account. All such emails are FAKES.

Here’s a link to our article which gives you some practice in identifying fake websites.
WebAngel.com.au/fakes/

About a year ago, we alerted our clients to the activities of the Australian Business Pages Directory.

Well, they’re still at it.
These people are sending business owners a “Listing Advice Notice” for their internet directory.

They don’t want any money from you with this first letter, but instead ask you to sign and return the advice notice which mentions an inclusion cost of $175 to be in their directory. If you sign and return this document, it would seem that you would have agreed to pay $175 for a listing.

The directory does not work. I’ve checked regularly for the past month or so, so it is not a temporary glitch.
(Edit: The search functions are working v-e-r-y- s-l-o-w-l-y as of mid October 2004.

So - Should you pay a very obscure search directory that nobody has ever heard of to provide the same information as is available in the yellow pages? ?
You’re an adult - You decide

Me? - I’ve binned their letter.

Adobe Acrobat is an essential program for most people, but the latest versions are painfully slow to load because of the great number of rarely used plugins that it loads each tome you fire it up.

This utility disables them, but will prompt you if a disabled plugin is required.
http://www.tnk-bootblock.co.uk/prods/misc/index.php

The Adobe speedup utility is on this page, together with quite a few other useful programs.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed that many otherwise excellent websites have one or more major problems that can really annoy the hell out of their users.

Here’s a new article and case study which tells you what they are, and what to do to fix them.

(There’s also a couple of secrets that even most marketing professionals don’t know)

webangel.com.au/info/5problems.htm

regards,
Eric G.

We have reduced our domain registration fees.

.com.au domains are now $88 for 24 months, including GST
.com domains are now $22 for 12 months, inc. GST

Please see webangel.com.au/domain_registration.htm for more information.