Rob's Blog

Update (02/02/2010): It would seem from the comments that this was a legitimate request for an autograph! MAybe I’m more famous than I think? Original post continues:

A few days ago I got a surprising email asking for my autograph (full text below). Despite getting literally tens of visitors to this blog per day, I am by no means a celebrity, so this either there is some famous person with my name (so famous I’ve never heard of them), this person is just trying their luck sending hundreds of emails hoping to get a real one or two, or this is some new scam to get my signature and use it to steal my identity.

I’ve searched for the sender of the email (Lalit Kumar Bajaj), and I can only find a few comments on blog posts requesting autographs and not much more, but it could be very new, or could be the scammers (if they are scammers) are using multiple names.

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I watched last week’s Gadget Show last night (I’m a week behind), and saw their review on the Sanyo Xacti WH1 waterproof camcorder. They listed it as “from £165″ which sounded amazing value, and considered buying it. Unfortunately it looks like they made a mistake on the price, as I couldn’t find a price anywhere near it.

I did find it at £189 however on a site I’d never heard of: Electronic Megastore electronicmegastore.com. I’m not sure what first made me wary of this site. Probably the fact it was at such a great price, and I’d never heard of the site before.

A quick Google Search came up with a page of customer reviews on Shobby. Some are great, but appear to be from similar IP addresses. The rest all talk about them being a scam run from a petrol station! This could be innocent and just a disgruntled customer/employee trying to spread rumours.

I decided to do my own investigations into the site, and have concluded that in my opinion the site is a scam, for the following reasons:

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I have just received a very strange sales called that went roughly like this:

Me: Hello, Rob Ferrer

Caller (in Indian Accent): Hello, I am calling from [easily forgettable company name]. May I speak to Mr Ferrer

Me: Speaking

Caller: I am calling about the computer

Me: OK…

Caller: I am calling about the computer

Me: Which computer?

Caller: I am calling about the Windows Operating System Computer

Me: Which Windows Operating System Computer?

- – Caller Hangs up – -

At least I am assuming it was a sales call. I have no idea what response they were hoping for. Of course the number was withheld.

Anyone had anything similar?

Update: @tonesav has directed me to this post which explains it is a scam to try and gain access to my computer!

I was writing an email to a friend, and tried to copy and paste a URL, but all that get pasted was “Text copying disabled”.

I thought maybe the site was preventing copying, so I disabled Javascript and tried again. Same problem. I tried copying some text within a text editor. Same problem.

Eventually I realised is was a survey I was completing in another tab (I like to multi-task). I looked at the source, and saw no JS. All there was was a piece of flash embedded.

Once I closed the survey everything worked, but it’s a bit worrying that flash can take over your computer to such an extent!

Does anyone know of any security settings that could stop this? Is there anything else Flash can do to take over a computer?

Update 2008-05-20:

I’ve had a lot of people coming to this blog looking for how to fix this. If I’m right, the easiest way to fix this will be to close all web browsers.

If this doesn’t work please let me know and I’ll look in to it. If it does work, feel free to comment too – I’d be interested to know how widespread the problem is.