A Classic Phish
I received this today, purportedly from Vodafone.
Dear Customer,
You have a pending security update on your Vodafone account to protect you against online theft.
Kindly visit http://www.vodafone.co.uk/new_security/update/account.html
Regards
The Vodafone Team
It’s been well setup, but it does exactly what you think. It points to a fake site and probably steals all of your details.
It actually points to a site called eadecom.net which is registered by Jose Canyellas Vila, who gave details of.
josep@senyal.com
LLuis Companys, 1 8-2 Lleida 25003
It wouldn’t make any difference to me, as I’ve never had any account with Vodafone.
Nice one, Jose. All it meant that was your details are now with the guys with heavy boots and even heavier truncheons. You better get the toilet paper ready. You’re going to need lots of it.
I’m not the first person to find Jose. He’s mentioned on PhishTank.
The Self-Filling Bath
I am refitting my bathroom in the next few weeks, as the current bath is one of Gerry’s El Cheapo specials, which is actually dangerous to get in and out of. It also has taps that work on a hot-one way, cold the other basis. There’s a video here.
I’m fitting a whirlpool bath and whilst talking to the saleslady, I thought it would be nice to have an self-filling option. I was told she’d never seen one. On the other hand you can get taps that set the temperature.
I searched the Internet and haven’t found a system.
I wonder why not! It’s a dream for a farmer, a builder or someone who works outside in the cold, wet and filth. Imagine you’re just coming to the end of a hard working day and are walking home or just about to get in your vehicle to drive there. You bring up an app on your smart phone or send a text from your Nokia 6310i to tell the bath to get itself ready in fifteen minutes say. It then fills itself to your required level and temperature, a couple of minutes before you get home.
The logic for the self filling bath is overwhelming. Even in my situation here, I would love to be able to set it off and then perhaps finish a post on my blog or a bit of cooking, whilst it was filling. After all,most of us just hang around in the bathroom, whilst waiting for the water to get to the required level and temperature.
It’s not that the technology is at all difficult. In my view, you wouldn’t actually measure the depth of water directly, but probably by weighing the bath with a simple load cell.
It’s just straightforward automation, that’s been around for years.
What I can’t understand, is why it is not commonplace? But then there are other simple pieces of automation that aren’t either.
Would You Disclose Your Name On Zopa?
Or any other financial site, that gave loans?
Zopa allows me to see who I have lent money to, their payment history and a few other details. Normally, the person is only identified by a code name. So you could lend to someone called MickeyMouse or Graham171.
In two cases though, I’ve been able to identify the borrower. One was actually someone, that I knew and the other is a reputable professional living and working in London.
Both incidentally, have had immaculate payment records, so they have nothing to hide.
But I do find it strange that someone would join a financial site and make it possible to identify them.
Job Scam – Hyde Park Hotel Revisited
In February 2010, I put up a post called Job Scam – Hyde Park Hotel. I’ve checked the hotel on Trip Advisor and there entry is here. it looks very little different to many hotels of this type in london.
My original post has since had a life of its own, if you look at the over a hundred comments on the site. And it is still regularly visited with page counts of
2010 – 1032
2011 – 541
2012 – 275
in the last three years.
It looks like the e-mails are starting to find mugs again, as I’ve had a couple of extra comments on the original post in the last couple of days.
This time though a figure of £210 is mentioned. So it’s obviously a worthwhile scam for those perpetrating it.
NatWorst Opens The Door To The Fraudsters
Natwest have brought in a system called Get Cash based on a mobile phone app. But according to this on the BBC’s web site, it’s all started to backfire.
It looks to me that the Get Cash app is just too easy a target for fraudsters and it appears to me as a humble programmer and system designer, that they used programmers and designers, who didn’t understand the criminal mind.
If my bank offers me a mobile phone app to do my banking or use a credit card, the answer is no, no a thousand times no!
Incidentally, the computer that does my banking, never leaves my house and sits behind a door with a powerful lock on it.
I usually only draw out cash from a small number of cash machines fairly close to my house or at the Angel.
The Times On Jimmy Wales
The Times drops its serious front today with a third leader about the marriage of Wikipedia’s founder; Jimmy Wales, in the style of the on-line encyclopaedia.
Now Lloyds And The Co-op Drop Us In It
Captain Mainwaring would not have been amused, as yesterday Lloyds and the Co-op seem to have had system errors, or as I prefer to call them programming bugs, in their computers. It’s here on the BBC.
It may have been unrelated but one of my credit cards wouldn’t work on-line yesterday and they asked me to phone them. They said they were just rebooting the computers, and it should be OK in a couple of hours. Do we reboot computers, as we generally give them a good kicking first?
How To Find Those Born On Your Exact Birthday
I was searching for those, who were born on or around my birthday and I’ve found a pretty sure way. Suppose, you’re looking for someone born reasonably famous born on the 30th September 1960. You just type.
wiki “born 30 September 1960”
into Google. Make certain you get the quotes right.
A Stray Airliner?
In my exploration of the Gospel Oak to Barking line, I decided to follow the line on Google Maps. All went well and I was able to see where the electrification stopped and kicked in around South Tottenham. And then I found this image, as the railway passes south of Seven Sisters station.
I wonder how many stray planes are available to view on Google Maps?
Can anybody identify the tail to determine the airline? Judging by the silhouette, it looks like it’s some variant of Boeing 737.
If you want to find it, type “Seven Sisters station” into Google and then select maps. The plane is just south of the station.
As someone, who has over a thousand hours in command of an aircraft, you are taught under Visual Flight Rules to fly with the line feature on your left. So it could be they’ve taken off from Stansted and they’re following the railway. But then, they wouldn’t be under these rules over London, except in very special circumstances.
Identifying the airline would help solve the puzzle!
Bank Transfer Traceability
One thing that annoys me about on-line banking, is that when you pay a bill like a credit card, you often can’t trace it at both ends, as often the reference doesn’t appear for some days. So now, I usually pay them making sure the last two digits are the day of the month. That way it becomes obvious, if the transfer has been made and what it was.
It really all comes down to the fact that banks do not provide full information on their statements. And when they’ve not got it, they don’t even give you a clue!
I would be ashamed if I’d designed such a poor system.
The Anonymous Widower 