Hendry Kai Ian Car Sale Scam

If you are a (potential) victim of this scam please email: frauddesk@cityoflondon.police.uk.

Some general rules to live your life by:

• If it seems to good to be true then it probably is.
  
• If it quacks like a scam, swims like a scam and waddles like a scam then it's probably a scam.
  
• Even if the deal is reeeeeeeeeeeally good.
  
• Especially if the deal is really good.
  
• Especially if they are selling a new VW Bora in excellent condition for "4000EUR".
  

Things that should raise suspicions:

• A seller does not seem to know which way around their own names should go, for example, Hendry is a surname and Ian is a first name , not vice versa.
  
• You google the person, and find a big fucking warning in RED and YELLOW on their homepage warning idiots people like you not to fall for the scam.
  
• Complicated stories that involve selling goods internationally, eg, I am on business in KENTUCKY USA and I need the iPhone for my son who is in Lagos Nigera... etc, or, the car is in London but for some reason I am selling it on a German website to German users only. See also below.
  
• Random capitalised words, eg: "YOU will ask a friend to come with you to Western Union Office. HE will make a transfer so that HE will be the sender and YOU will be the receiver. YOU will receive the money from Western Union in UK,London"
  
• Native English speakers making simple errors, eg: "If you are not agree with this depozit i will not have eny problem, you can come to my when you want i dont have problem but i will not keep the car for you until you are here..Let me explain to you way i want this depozit:" (Ironically there is a distinct lack of capitalisation here, as well as uses of Z and missing As that wouldn't even be acceptable in America.)
  

Things not to trust on the internet:

• Images of passports. This does not prove anything apart from the fact that the seller has a picture of a passport. That image may have been doctored, the passport may not be real, or they may have just found a picture of someone else's passport that they rather inadvisedly put on flickr.
  
• Western Union. It seems that it is very easy to retrieve money from Western Union that is not meant for you.

UPDATE: If you want to scam the scammers a fake Western Union receipt might be in order.

UPDATE: Apparently Mr. Hendry Kai Ian is now offering a BMZ Z4 Cabrio for €5500. Yes, it's still a scam, no matter how much you wish it wasn't.

UPDATE: And a Jeep Wrangler.

Sparkle

As it was Guy Fawkes last week the BBC's latest Your Photos gallery is on the subject of sparkle. As you can see, a number of the entries used sparklers to draw pictures on the camera's sensor. If I'd thought about it I would have sent them this picture that I took at Maddy's party.

I Take It All Back

I have previously sung the praises of O2's broadband support, well I take it back. I assume that when I joined O2 broadband they still had decent customer support as a hang over from Be Unlimited, well now it seems that O2 have managed to bring their broadband technical support in-line with their mobile technical support, ie, non-existent. I've been having major DNS problems for a few weeks and it seemed to be getting worse (dropping out for about a minute at a time, becoming more and more frequent). I had called a few times, waiting up to 10 minutes on hold and eventually emailed them. They promise to respond within 24 hours. Three working days later someone replied, asking me to call them in order to resolve the issue! The thing is that I know that my issue is not isolated, I don't know many people who use O2 broadband, yet at least one of them has the same issue as me. I have tried calling a few times since, but to no avail, I just get a "we are experiencing high call volumes at the moment" message. You would think that they could hire extra staff. I have since added a couple of public DNS servers to my list which has improved matters. To be fair, since I haven't actually managed to get through, I can't really comment on the quality of support you might get if you did get through, though I didn't reckon much to the email response.

UPDATE: After another three working days I got a second reply saying that the agent could not help me as my from address was not registered with the account. So I have been trying to use their broken form to add my email address to the account. I cannot believe how broken it is, it won't let me save the email address because my postal address is not formated correctly, and the type of phone field is mandatory, and each time the form reloads all the data I have entered disappears.