It’s the golden rule of the internet – if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. There’s currently a JB Hi-Fi scam doing the rounds on Facebook promising a free $200 gift card to the first 25,000 attendants of a special JB Hi-Fi event. The only thing you’re going to win by joining the event is compromised privacy and online security. More »
Josh Olin, community manager for Call of Duty: Black Ops developers Treyarch, has alerted fans of the game to the fact that someone is contacting Xbox 360 players claiming to be a Treyarch employee, assuming the identity of the gamertags that appear in the clip.
As Olin points out, because the game is still in development, it’s not being played on public Xbox Live servers, nor is it being played using those developer’s actual gamertags (they’re temporary ones used when messing with the game on partnernet, Microsoft’s Xbox Live testbed).
What these scammers are actually up to, Olin doesn’t say, but it’s not likely to be requests for an afternoon of pleasant discourse and a cup of tea. So if someone contacts you saying they work for Treyarch, stay away!
This is…different. Square Enix have issued a statement claiming that “certain unknown parties” based in Canada have been sending counterfeit cheques to random homes across the United States. Cheques that say “Square Enix” on them. More »
HM Customs (as in Her Majesty’s – the Queen hates smuggling) has issued a warning against fake Nintendo DS Lites that can (possibly) cause you physical harm as well as financial.
This kind of story deserves its own new word: Chutzpidity. Because a guy in Minnesota had both in equal and voluminous supply for this particular scam. Over a full year, this guy bought nearly 200 games, worth more than $25,000, replaced them with blanks, got the refunds, then sold the real games on eBay. The re-sale netted him almost $US19,000.
Now, while the alleged scammer was clever enough to forge a label on the blanks, and then repackage the games to make them look brand new (and also avoid an inspection that would discover the blanks) did he honestly think no one would notice 192 REFUNDS on a credit card and start asking questions? It takes enormous gall or a lack of brains, or both — hence chuzpidity — to keep going with this after getting $10K in tax-free ill-gotten booty and leaving a paper trail that stretches to Sioux Falls.
I’m looking for an apartment. Haven’t had to do this in about three years. So yesterday, I’m on Craigslist and I find the Cognitive Dissonance Bargain of a lifetime: Two bedrooms, 1300 sq feet, air conditioning, parking, cat-friendly, in San Francisco’s white-approved Noe Valley, for $US 1300.
“That’s a Nigerian 419 scam,” my friend at work said. “They put these dream homes up and try to sucker you into placing a holding fee or deposit.”
I was crushed. I could take the relentless fakery and heartbreak of trolling for online sex in the spam-soaked CL casual encounters. But housing? Was nothing sacred? And now there is this:
We really hope you didn’t bite when “Sega” asked if you still owned a Dreamcast, promising you a snazzy @dreamcast.com e-mail address in return. It might not have been worth it, as the Mainichi Shimbun is reporting that Sega has called the Dreamcast.com web site nothing but a “bogus” domain squatter, saying that whomever is currently using the site is using Sega’s trademarks and logos without permission. At best, its just a fan site collecting Dreamcast serial numbers for an exhaustive database, but at worst it may be a phishing scam built on the foundation of nostalgia for September 9, 1999.
While you may already be on the receiving end of some fresh spam, I’d definitely recommend a quick password change to whatever e-mail address you used if you submitted your info.
Sega Calls Attention to Dreamcast Imposter Site [Yahoo Japan]
Following hot on the heals of the Mexican X-Game 360, comes this: an LED football game on what looks like a Wii-mote. (How the hell do you play that?) Found over at game site 4CR, they say its the first Wii-mote knock off thingy they’ve seen. I gotta agree! Don’t remember seeing any faux Wii-mote doohickeys until this. And I’m thinking this won’t be the last one, either. Wii Fake [4CR] More »
Confused? Heck, I’m confused, and I wrote this. Kotakuite Erzengel spotted a NES emulator in a Mexican shopping mall that looks an Xbox 360. He writes:
I was walking around a well known mexican mall (wich makes sense since im mexican), when i saw, in a “serious” store, this pieces of… well, the pic says it all. Its a Xbox-like 8BITS videogame system. Yup, 8 bits, wich means NES quality games, in a shiny white box. Makes me kind of sad, many kids are gonna get this because their tech impaired parents wont be able to see the differences. In case you ask, the price is around US$28.
Wonder if Super Mario Bros. causes it to lock up and crap out. Zing! More »
