Whispers from the Wild

I’ve been looking for new contracts through Kijiji and Craigslist, and while following up leads have been approached by quite a well organized group of scammers.  In this article, I’m going to go through the way they operated, the warning flags and the eventual smackdown of them when I got tired of dealing with their nonsense.

The first contact was a job posting for “administrative assistant”, requesting resumes.  I sent mine, and got an email back (sent several times) from an address registered at hotmail.

Dear  Employee  (Personal Assistant)
Your email is recorded.I explained to you via email job description,hours and lot more but again here is the details.
You will be working with my Boss James Scott who will be arriving location in few days but before he arrives you will pay for his hotel and also hire a car,he will drive himself.
So payment you got is for the purpose,deposit payment in your bank and wait 3-4 days to clear,when it clears you will then take care of hotel.
I WILL OFFER THE FOLLOWING COMPENSATION:

(1)           Weekly pay $350 for 2 hours daily (Monday – Friday)= 10 hours weekly
(2)           Tips comes regularly
(3)                 Will keep up to my salary payment even before the week ruins out

UPFRONT DUTIES:
1.deposit payment
2. Pay for hotel and car hire service
3.You will take off $350 when funds clear for your weekly pay.
4.Download a yahoo or msn messenger and add me on  (mary.mac1@live.com) so we can chat for more directives.

Contact me when payment is deposited.

Mary

A couple of things to note here.  First of which, this came from a yahoo address (personalasstmary@att.net – yahoo run the att.net email system) and it directs the victim to contact a hotmail (live.com) address.  It also asks for the person to add them to a messenger program, because instant messengers work faster and are less trackable.

Initially I ignored this message, so it wasn’t long before another one appeared, again from att.net:

Dear  Employee  (Personal Assistant)
Your email is recorded.I explained to you via email job description,hours and lot more but again here is the details.
You will be working with my Boss James Scott who will be arriving location in few days but before he arrives you will pay for his hotel and also hire a car,he will drive himself.
So payment you got is for the purpose,deposit payment in your bank and wait 3-4 days to clear,when it clears you will then take care of hotel.
I WILL OFFER THE FOLLOWING COMPENSATION:

(1)           Weekly pay $350 for 2 hours daily (Monday – Friday)= 10 hours weekly
(2)           Tips comes regularly
(3)                 Will keep up to my salary payment even before the week ruins out

UPFRONT DUTIES:
1.deposit payment
2. Pay for hotel and car hire service
3.You will take off $350 when funds clear for your weekly pay.
4.Download a yahoo or msn messenger and add me on  (mary.mac1@live.com) so we can chat for more directives.

Contact me when payment is deposited.

Mary

I ignored this one too.  Then came the most plausible part of the scam.  A check arrived in the post, posted from a residential address in Toronto.  The check, as you can see, looks quite authentic (I’ve added the watermark to make sure nobody else tries to download and use this check):

A convincing looking check arrives in the post

Unfortunately the accompanying letter was less convincing:

APPROVAL LETTER

This is an approval letter to inform you that you have been approved to work with my Boss for 1 year, 2 hours weekly.  We apologise [SIC] for the long delay.

Task:  Verify the attached check, and contact MARY MAC at mary_mac1@live.com for more directives.  Payment is for Hotel and Car hire.  There are a few more tasks when JAMES SCOTT arrives at your location.

Thanks

Sandra Goaty

Accounts

The accompanying letter had no signature.

So let’s look at red flags that result from this check:

1. What company sends out $5,000 checks from a residential address?
2. The signature on the check is clearly scanned, there’s distortion around it and around the amount and payee details
3. At the top it says “This document has a colored background and microprinting”.  There is no microprinting

I’m particularly amused that the letter instructs the victim to “verify the attached check” – there’s a reason for this; if you suspect the check to be a forgery (which it is) and you take it to the police, you’ve passed what’s called “Due Diligence” and thus have not been defrauded.  As long as you didn’t deposit the check, no offense has been committed and the police are powerless to act.  If you didn’t verify the check YOU have committed the offense because you’ve passed a forged check to the bank without due diligence.  It’s a neat getout to the scammers.

However, once the victim has the check the scammers have to hurry, because if the victim does deposit the check, there’s only a limited amount of time before the bank discovers the forgery and reverses the transaction.  Their aim is therefore to get as much real money sent back to them as quickly as possible, before the transaction is reversed.

So, as the letter asked for a hotel booking and car rental, I responded thus:

Dear Mary,

To confirm check number 1237 in the value of $4,900 arrived this morning.  In order to proceed with bookings we will need to know the following information:

• FULL NAME that the car is to be booked in – the car hire company will also require a photocopy of the drivers license for insurance purposes.  This license must be the same as is shown when picking the vehicle up
• Whether or not the vehicle is going to be returned to the same car hire point or whether it is on an A to B hire, and will be dropped at an approved dropoff point different to the pickup point
• Flight time, number and airport if appropriate
• Which hotel your boss wishes to stay at and the full name to be used in the booking.

Please furnish these details to continue.

Best regards,

Edward Sheldon

While the scammers pontificated, I ran some background checks just to be certain.  As I had predicted, the background checks proved this payment to be a complete forgery.  There is no Sandra Goaty or Mary Smith working for Compass Group Canada.  Also, their address on the check is wrong, and their check numbering system is totally different.

Suddenly in the scammers next email, the flight isn’t booked, and the rental car isn’t needed:

*  FULL NAME that the car is to be booked in – the car hire company will also require a photocopy of the drivers license for insurance purposes.  This license must be the same as is shown when picking the vehicle up- DO NOT BOOK FOR A CAR ANYMORE,HE GOT OFFERS FROM A COMPANY ALREADY

* Whether or not the vehicle is going to be returned to the same car hire point or whether it is on an A to B hire, and will be dropped at an approved dropoff point different to the pickup point
* Flight time, number and airport if appropriate- NOT BOOK FLIGHT YET NOW

* Which hotel your boss wishes to stay at and the full name to be used in the booking.
SEND LIST6 OF 5 STAR HOTEL CLOSE TO YOU

QUESTIONS FOR YOU

HAVE YOU DEPOSITED PAYMENT
2.SELECT YOUR HOURS  SO WE CAN WORK IT OUT HERE
3.ADD ME ON MSN CHAT, MARY.MAC1@LIVE.COM SO WE CAN CHAT
I AWAIT YOUR EMAIL

Note she STILL wants me to add her on a messenger.  Emails are both time consuming, and can be traceable, and she doesn’t want to leave any bigger trail than necessary.

Even though I have no intention of banking the check, I claim that I have.  I also knock on the head ANY chance of using a messenger:

1) Yes, there should be news from the bank on Wednesday or Thursday

2)  Any time during normal business hours is good

3)  We DO NOT USE instant messenger programs, including MSN.  They are insecure and open to abuse by hacking or security loopholes.

Edward

This puts pressure on them, because if the check IS indeed in the clearance system, then this means that there’s only a limited amount of time until the bank discovers the fraud.  They have to get the money quickly if the scam is to work.

So they go for the goal of the scam.  I receive this email:

Hello
How are you and hope you okay. At this point your email is clear and Scott instruct me to inform you that you need to  contct his fabric supplier and order 30kg of swedishlace fabrics

I am not sure if i inform you that he his opening a clothing line and needs orders
Have this done and inform me soon
her info is
NAME- THAMINA HAQUE
EMAIL- haquethamina@yahoo.se

contact her and inform her you are the assistant to James Scott and need to place order so you need price

Mary

Again, note how this new contact also is an anonymous email address, this time at Yahoo.  I’m curious to find out how greedy the scammers are, so I send this email to the yahoo address given:

Dear Thamina,

We have been asked to approach you on behalf of James Scott and ask for a quotation for the following materials:

30kg Swedishlace Fabric

Please forward a link to your online catalog and ordering system.

Best regards,

Edward Sheldon

The reply is not long in coming:

Ref- 001

Here is Thamina Haque and from recommedation from Scott here is the price of your order plus insurance to Toronto will cost $4500

You will have to send payment to

Enamul Haque

Address- 43 normarz str

city-  Farsta

State- Sweden

Country- Sweden

$4500  By western union

Contact me with details when sent,then you orders will be processed and delivered within 3 working days

I am sending copy of email to Scott our customer for years.

Thamina Haque

Wow!  They want almost all of it back… or should I say, they want me to send them legitimately, the amount they pretended to send me.  Note how they want payment by western union, which would involve the victim paying that amount in cash at a western union office.  Once an amount is paid in cash, that cash is gone to the recipient.  There is no chance of ever getting it back.

Note also that they quote a price in dollars.  This I use to trip them up.  I respond immediately:

Hi Thamina,

Please choose an alternative payment method.  Western union is not a payment method we support.

Best regards,

Edward Sheldon

The reply is almost indignant, but contains a major flaw:

Ref-002

Due to country differences in currency we wont be able to use any means ONLY MONEY GRAM OR WESTERN UNION,so  you can use money gram,check location around you.

When are we expecting payment so orders will be ready.

THIS IS THE WAY SCOTT ALWAYS SENT FUNDS TO US,CONFIRM FROM HIM

Thamina Haque

Waaaaait a minute… Differences in currency?  What differences in currency?  You quoted me in dollars, didn’t you?  I respond, in a clearly suspicious tone:

What differences in currency?  Your quotation requested payment in dollars, did it not?

I also write to “Mary Mac” and tell her I have a price, but I don’t tell her I’m suspicious of the western union part.  The next reply from her was so bad my spam filter dumped it in junk mail and I didn’t find it till later:

Hello
I am aware that payment is delivered, The list of hotel must be sent to me for selection because my boss arrives few days to come.
he also PREFERS YOU CONTACT HIS FABRIC SUPPLIER VIA EMAIL-  ( THAMINA HAQUE – EMAIL-  haquethamina@yahoo.se )
Order for 30kg swedishlace fabric,find out cost and inform me here,she will be contacted too.
My boss so far appreciate your effort ,email me if you have any question and also deposit payment.
Lastly,Add me on chat messenger  so we can chat some more very importantly ( mary.mac1@live.com)

Mary

Despite the earlier admonition that I don’t use messengers, there she goes again with the messenger thing.  Showing some impatience, I respond:

Hello Mary,

I will reiterate:  Messengers ARE NOT USED during work hours.  It is not that I cannot add you, it’s that I won’t add you.  The use of messengers during work hours is grounds for disciplinary action.

I have contacted Thamina, and I forwarded her quotation to you.  However she seems a little mixed up over payment currencies, having given a quote in dollars she’s now asking for a different currency to be used, and hasn’t specified what currency yet.

Please let me know which airport your boss will be flying into, and the flight number, so that we can book appropriate hotels.  There is no point in booking a hotel miles away from where he wants to be or where he’s landing as gas prices are prohibitively high and car rental companies charge by the kilometer if you go over the agreed distance allowance.  Believe me, that can get VERY expensive – we want to do this right in order to minimize costs.

Payment was deposited Friday, it should be clear tomorrow or Thursday.

Edward

The flight’s a red herring.  The hotels are a method of fishing for local information so that future scams will look more plausible.  It’s always more plausible to appear to know what hotels are local, it gives the impression that they know the area because their staff travel there frequently.  I’m not about to feed that.  I’ve also now told her that there’s going to be a problem getting the money via western union.  While I wait for her next move, I send off a quick email enquiry to Western Union asking if there’s any way they can put a notification on a fake transfer that the recipient is involved in fraud and needs to be arrested.  Now they know they need to hurry – this last email in its subject header emphasized how the tasks contained therein were to be completed TODAY.  If I had indeed banked the check last Friday, the hours are rapidly counting down until the bank would discover the fraud and reverse the payment.

After several hours, they respond again:

ref-004

i mean currency difference wont permit us to accept credit card or bank to bank transfer? we use swedish koran

The best option is western union or money gram since Scott want order within 3 days

Thamina Haque

This is looking weaker and weaker.  For a start, they can’t spell “Krona” (the Swedish currency) correctly.  Secondly, any international transfer of funds is handled by a bank in native currency.  If you use, for example, paypal, to send money to Sweden, and the person in Sweden has their account registered to accept Swedish Krona, Paypal will translate it into Krona automatically (minus their cut, of course).  It’s not that it can’t be done, it can – it’s that they don’t want it to be done.  They want as much of the money being banded around as they can get.

Now sounding considerably pissed off, I respond (BCCing “Mary Mac” who is, of course, also “Thamina Haque”) with this:

1)  What Swedish natiional mistakes their currency, the Krona with an Islamic holy book?

2) 4500 Swedish Krona is $630.66 according to paypal, who, incidentally, work in Canadian dollars, US Dollars and Swedish Krona.  So which is it that you are wanting payment in?  4500 Swedish Krona ($630.66) or 4500 Canadian dollars (which works out at 31,895.43 Swedish Krona – a bit pricey for fabric, even given customs fees and international postage)

3) Paypal can guarantee a secured delivery to ANY email address within seconds, and you don’t even have to go to a receiving point to pick the money up.  A Paypal payment is backed by one of the biggest international payment companies in the world.

Why are you insisting in payment by western union?

Edward

At this point I’m about to draw the scam to a close – it’s by now blatently clear they’re scam artists, I’ll allow them one more attempt to get hold of the nonexistent money before closing the net.

Before long, the response comes back:

Ref-005

We do not use paypal here and reason why we prefer money gram or western union is because it is realible and fast,bank to bank transfer takes 7 working days to get here from over sea company,so that not okay knowing that shippment must depart tommorrow

have a great night

Thamina Haque

The “have a great night” is another amusing touch, given that it would now be late evening in Sweden – another indicator that this isn’t actually a company.

So there we have it.  Time to end this.

Well, it’s been fun folks, but now it’s time to end this scam.  Fact is, I didn’t deposit your fraudulent check on Friday because it was a blatant forgery.  Instead I took it to Detective Gajkowski of Waterloo Regional Police’s fraud squad.  He’d very much like to talk to you, Mary or Thamina or whatever your real name is.  Go on, call him, I dare you – 519 653 7700 extension 8375.

Credit where credit is due, that was quite a photoshop job on the check.  But it’s still absent several security features, and gives the wrong address for the company it pretends to be issued by.  Nontheless, I did conduct due diligence – after all, your own letter said “verify the attached check”.  Well, I contacted the Compass Group and they’ve never heard of Sandra Goaty, your supposed accountant, or Mary Smith who supposedly signed the check.

But you still have a lot of mistakes in your little act.  Cancelling the car was good, and nice try fishing for local information about hotels but that ain’t gonna wash either.  Getting the Swedish currency mixed up was a bit of a giveaway, as was getting mixed up with the exchange rates.  Also, not knowing how the international banking system works was another red flag.

So there we have it – nice try, but no prize.  Go try scam someone else, your reverse check fraud isn’t going to work on me, even if it was fun to lead you on for a while.  And it made great material for a blog article and further lectures to my students about things to look out for spotting this kind of fraud.

Have a nice life.  Losers.

I don’t expect to hear from them again, but I’ll update this post if I do.

I received a call today from a rather worried lady who had a laptop where the hard drive was reporting imminent failure.  She’d approached Best Buy about a repair, and they had quoted her over $300.

This didn’t seem at all right to me.  New hard drives of the size hers was (she had a 160Gb) for laptops come in at around $60.  Over $240 for an engineering fee seemed absolutely outrageous.  So I asked a few more pertinent questions, and the con was revealed.

When she bought the laptop, just over 16 months ago, it came with Windows Vista on it.  Best Buy’s “solution” was to basically take the failing hard drive out and bin it, replacing it with a new hard drive that would then lack an operating system.  They had no intention of making any attempt whatsoever to migrate the data on the failing hard drive, so the extra money it turned out was for a brand new license of Windows 7.

So, they wanted over $300 for losing ALL the customers data and providing the customer with an operating system she didn’t want and she didn’t need.

This, to me, sums up what’s wrong with todays “computer repair” companies.  They operate on a “get it in, perform the most convenient to the company fix, get it out, get paid” basis.  They don’t care about the customer, all they want is the fee.

Now admittedly, it took Norton Ghost over five an a half hours to read the data off the failing hard drive, and another hour and a half to write it to the new drive – but that was mainly unsupervised work; leaving the computer that was reading the data alone to get the job done and only needing to do anything whenever an alert came up.  But the point is, after that 7 hours the customer had a new hard drive which she’d paid for, and a reasonable engineering fee – and that’s all.  She still had Vista, she still had all her documents and data, and essentially the computer is completely unchanged appearance and function-wise, other than having a larger amount of free space owing to her buying a 320Gb hard drive (which she decided to do since the price difference between 160Gb and 320Gb was only $10).

There’s no excuse for pushing customers into such expensive and unnecessary repairs in their hour of need – none whatsoever.  It’s like taking a car in for a puncture repair and selling someone a new axle.  It’s dishonest trading, and there’s no reason why anyone should have to put up with it.  Bad show, Best Buy, bad show!

There’s a huge lie being repeated time and time again, mainly but not exclusively by the right.  The lie goes something like this:  The US can’t stop drilling for oil just because of the Deepwater Horizon spill, because doing so is giving up on moving away from dependency on oil to other fuels.

To this I say: What… the… fuck????

You don’t cure dependency by taking more of the drug.  You don’t cure dependency on oil for drilling for more oil – you cure dependency on oil by drilling for LESS oil and implementing other solutions.

It’s a lie.  An outright lie.  These people don’t want to break free of oil, they want to go on drilling and drilling until the last drop is earned.  Then… well, they don’t have a plan for then, they refuse to look at that scenario.  Ask any rabid right winger what happens when the oil runs out, and I guarantee you that not only will they not give you a straight answer, but if you can ever pin them down through the BP-sized gushing of bullshit that comes out of their mouths, they will actually find a way to deny the scenario exists in the first place.  Out of sight, out of mind.

The earth has less than fifty years of oil left.  We’ve extracted nearly all of it.  When it’s gone, it’s gone, and it will take centuries for the earth to make more of it.  At that time, ANY nation still dependent on oil is fucked.  Completely fucked.  You cannot run on what you can no longer find to harvest.  Most telling of all, the biggest and best equipped army in the world is useless, if you have no fuel for the tanks and aircraft.

That more drilling will help lead to weaning off oil is a shameless lie, and it’s about time people started laughing in the faces of those who repeat it.  Drilling today won’t even effect oil prices for years; likewise stopping drilling today won’t effect oil prices for years.  This planet of ours produces far more means of generating the power and resources we need than just oil.  If we put our minds to it, we can wean ourselves away from oil before the last drop is drilled, but we need to have the right mindset for doing it, and the right mindset is not to pretend the scenario where we drill the last drop and then still don’t have any alternatives prepared to take over doesn’t exist.

I tend to hear that a lot from people who have finally called me to come and see the computer that has at long last collapsed under the weight of the malware/spyware/viruses/trojans it’s been gathering over the last however long.

It’s also normal that I hear that the most from people who don’t want to spend the money investing in the defense programs mandatory to being a broadband internet user in 2010.  A few of them have one of the free antivirus programs, and for some reason believe that is all they need.  No firewall, no IM checker, no email scanner – a reactive, rather than proactive, antivirus program.  One that will only pick up infections when it’s run manually.

The programs I generally use to clean these systems inevitably scan the registry file.  Some of the worse infections can add their own keys to legitimate programs, in an attempt to make backdoors for them.  These backdoors are then used to further compromise the security of the system.

So if the scanner detects this, and removes the damaged keys, it can cause some applications to cease working, or to display confusing information.  In which case, there’s normally nothing to stop the faulty application being uninstalled from control panel and reinstalled.

I wish that peoples computer ability wouldn’t apparently totally desert them the second that happens.  It’s a real pain to end up being asked to come back not once, but twice or even three times – not because I resent follow on calls, they are part of giving a good service… but I DO resent, if someone books a follow on call, them not bothering to make note of EVERYTHING that doesn’t work and then expecting other follow on calls for things they forgot.  These won’t be free, people.  Most engineers don’t have a Follow On Call policy – I do, and a directly related problem is free to solve.  But that only goes so far, so before booking one PLEASE make sure you know all the problems you’re having, because if you think of anything later – it’s a chargeable call again.

They keep coming…

cash job

looking for any cash job,

im god in gardeniong and flowers so any landscape need help let me know

Hmm.  Where to start with this one?  He’s apparently God.  In gardeniong, whatever that is, but I suppose a junior deity must start somewhere, even if it’s presiding over something nobody has ever heard of.  You can tell that he actually is God, though, because his ad is addressed to the landscape not to any puny mortal human out there.  After all, who but God could understand the landscape when it spoke to him?

Kijiji seems to bring out the worst in job applicants.  I decided to start a new classification of blog entry for the worst of them.  First up we have this:

Personal Jobs

hi im looking 4 someone 2 do personal jobs,.,.u will have 2 email me all tell u what i need do or jobs that i have ,.,prices are random.,.depends on the job,.,.so if u want 2 no more or u have any guestions fell free 2 email me thanks .,.,.,.,johnny0169@live.com

Wow… just… wow.

It’s hard to tell if this guy wants a job or wants someone to do a job for him.  Fix his spacebar, maybe, since it doesn’t appear to be able to work twice in a row, causing him to need to have pretty patterns of full stops and commas to separate sentences or paragraph breaks.  Special points for the “random prices” on his jobs, but I certainly don’t “fell” good about working for someone whose mathematics skills may be as bad as his spelling skills.  I might end up paying HIM for his “personal jobs”.

That sounds SO wrong…

So we get a computer in that’s just under 3 years old.  It has a habit of shutting itself off unexpectedly.  I’ve met this problem before, and it can be a pain to diagnose, but downloading a nice little diagnostic tool showed me straight away where the problem was.  The core temperature (the temperature the CPU runs at) was around 22°C when the machine was idling, which is normal, but the second you tried to run anything the temperature went up… and up… and up.  When it hit 82°C – well into the danger zone for a CPU – it shut off completely.

There is an easy solution to that.  Replace the heatsink fan that sits on top of the CPU with something that has a bit more muscle.  As the machine was going to be used mainly for gaming from now on, I chose a good quality, reasonably priced fan that would draw off as much heat as possible.  Got home, assembled it, installed it…

And the problems began.

First of all, the machine wouldn’t start.  It claimed the CPU heatsink fan had failed (which we could see wasn’t the case, even though the fan was only spinning relatively slowly).  This was a BIOS message, there was no way to get around it other than to plug the old fan in until the computer had passed the initial tests, then unplug the old fan and plug in the new fan while it was loading Windows.  The second crappy cheap part was the BIOS, an abhorrent Phoenix bios that shows you as little as possible and lets you actually control and set the options for even less.  This was not helped by a contradictory article on the manufacturers website that claimed it was possible to disable the heatsink fan detection by going into the BIOS when in fact the crappy BIOS didn’t have that option at all.  This check is also carried out when the machine wakes from sleep mode as well, so we not only have to leave it on all the time but also disable its power saving functions to avoid it claiming the fan doesn’t work when it does.

Finally we discover after several hours of fruitless being disconnected by the less than helpful live chat staff, that the third crappy part is the most important part of all – the power supply.  It can drive the bits the machine came with – just about – but add anything else and the power supply can’t cope.  It’s only rated at 220w, so even adding a second hard drive will put a strain on it that will likely burn it out rapidly.  The BIOS detection message is coming up because the heatsink fan, being a heavy duty gaming fan, requires a bit of oomph from the power supply.  It’s made more for a gaming machine with a 450w or above power supply, not the few-dollars-cheaper 220w supply the machine came with.

And the worst part about this?  The machine still cost around $100 MORE than I could have built a machine from parts that had the same CPU, same level of memory, same sized hard drive but a much more powerful power supply capable of further expansion.  For $80 less than this machine costs I could have built a comparable one with a 650w power supply, more powerful graphics card and full expandability.

What was the manufacturer’s response?  “We no longer support your machine  because you fitted a third party fan rather than send it back to us (out of warranty) so we could put a new crappy little fan in it that probably wouldn’t do the job but would make us a lot of money.”

Shame on you, Hewlett Packard!  Shame on you for creating the Pavilion 6100n as a substandard machine made of substandard parts with no intention of permitting future expansion without ripping out almost half of the machine and replacing it.  You should know better.  It’s not worth making an extra $100 profit on one machine by building it out of substandard bits, only to have the end user do exactly what they’ve done in this case: say “I’m never buying one of THESE again, they’re crap!”

And while I might disagree with some people giving up on machines too quickly, I have to say this consumer is entirely justified in calling it crap.  I call it crap too.  Very expensive crap.  It’s about time machine manufacturers woke up to the fact that if you build in obsolescence to your machines, you’re going to lose your customers pretty damn quick.

Around six months ago, I started having a few problems with the hands free kit to my mobile phone.  I took the phone into the telus mobility shop to ask their advice.  The assistant took the back off the phone, pointed to a tiny sticker which was very slightly pink and said “This phone has water damage.  That voids your warranty, and you will have to pay the full price for a repair or replacement.”  I said thanks but no thanks, as the phone was working fine.

But I got to wondering, what IS a water damage sticker, and how accurate is it?

Well, water damage stickers are used in almost every smartphone these days.  They are small stickers usually around half a centimeter in size, and are placed inside the phone.  Apple actually go one further with the Iphone, and place at least one and in some cases two on the outside of the phone.  Even if the outside of the phone then comes into contact with moisture, Apple will claim this voids the warranty.

But the stickers are not infallible.  Look around the internet and you will see all kinds of postings about how different kinds of things affect them.  One of the main things is relative humidity.  I bought some of these stickers and tested them out.

One of the best places to go for high relative humidity is the exotic bird/butterfly house at Toronto zoo.  We placed several stickers inside a dummy phone’s back cover, and several on the outside.  The results were quite astonishing.  Within five minutes, the outside stickers were no longer white.  One, where the phone was in contact with clothing, turned quite a bright red – recording a very false positive.  But worse was the fact that the stickers placed INSIDE also were affected, although it took longer.  90 minutes into our test, all six stickers were beginning to turn pink or red, this would be an automatic rejection by a telephone company as “water damage” – and yet our dummy telephone had never been near water.

Other places you might come into contact with high humidity in the home are if your mobile phone is in a handbag or pocket near to a shower or bath, or if you have a baby nursery and you have a humidifier in the room.  Dew moisture – that is, from going from a warm room to a cold outside – can also turn a sticker if the temperature change is sufficiently fast.  All of these can, over time, influence the stickers in these devices.

Which leads to a very important question:  Where do they stand legally?

The answer to that depends on the country.  In the United Kingdom there are much stronger safeguards than there are in the United States or Canada.  The law in the UK does not yet recognize these stickers as being grounds to void a warranty, as no case has yet been brought before the courts. UK consumer law requires that the item – in this case the telephone handset – be sturdy enough to withstand reasonable wear and tear and still be “suitable for use for the purpose for which it was sold.”   Thus, if a customer decides to threaten legal action the onus would actually be on the telephone company to prove that these indicator stickers were a reliable proof of direct water damage, rather than on the person suing them.  If they could not prove to a courts satisfaction that the stickers were not likely to record a false postitive over time, they could find themselves required to warranty repair handsets that didn’t have more obvious water damage.  This they want to avoid doing, so it would be likely they would spin the “as a gesture of good faith, and not admitting liability, as you’re such a good customer we’ll repair the phone for free just this once – but if we do, you are agreeing that should the same happen in future, you ARE liable for repair costs.”  Be aware that this spin does actually change the terms of a future warranty on that device.  Caveat Emptor if you accept this.

In North America it’s quite a different story.  In Canada consumer protection laws are certainly stronger than in the US, but Canadian consumer law would likely leave the customer having to prove a false positive; not that difficult given our experience at Toronto zoo – maybe someone should make a YouTube video of it.

The worst consumer protection is in the United States.  Here the consumer would have to prove beyond reasonable doubt and through the court system that the stickers could give false positives, and even then that would not necessarily prove that their particular phone had not been water damaged.  Add to that the delaying tactics a large phone manufacturer could apply which would lead the case to go on for years, and you have such a massive lawyers bill that most plaintiffs would have to drop the case – it would be just too expensive.

There are no figures which accurately show how much money these tiny little stickers save the mobile phone industry in what would otherwise be warranty repairs.  Given the high traffic of discussion on the subject in forums, the figure is likely to be quite substantial.  Interestingly enough, the answer to the conundrum in all three countries is to actually find and remove these stickers, since it then becomes the onus of the manufacturer to prove they were there in the first place.  More savvy companies are trying to find voidable stickers that cannot be removed without leaving a trace just to stop this.  Another answer is to scotch tape a cut piece of paper over the top of the sticker, as the tape would then provide a moisture barrier.  This is likely to be the reason Apple build these into the case itself, as to seal these off from moisture becomes practically impossible.

But the question we SHOULD be asking is not how can we get around these stickers, but more why should we have to?  As a consumer society, large companies such as cellphone manufacturers are clearly now exploiting their customers, building these things with a kind of built in obsolescence.  It’s a good example of corporatism in action, shifting any blame for the failure of their devices onto the customer, with these stickers being a perfect example of the method.  Either way, the solution as ever is to be informed.  Know your local consumer rights, know about how these stickers can cause false positives, and be prepared to challenge your local outlet as it is with them (as provider of the equipment to you, the end user) you have a contract, and not with the actual cellphone manufacturer.

Good luck.

Further reading:

http://www.belowtopsecret.com/forum/thread510940/pg1

http://techgeist.net/2009/09/apple-iphone-abuse-detection-sensors-abusing-2/

I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry when I saw this.  The text at the top reads:

i bought one of these and tried putting in my dell dimension 2350. my friend said that the shiny metal part on the bottom looks like it has lines because you cut at the lines if it doesnt fit. so i carefully cut off the bottom so that it fit into 1 of the slot things in my computer. now it doesnt work. did i cut it wrong? id post pics, but no camera. is there anyway i can fix this? thanks for any help.

For those who have never seen one of these before, it’s a graphics card.  A very EXPENSIVE graphics card.  One of these will set you back over $100.

Here’s a clue – you should NEVER, EVER have to take a hacksaw or other cutting implement to a piece of hardware.  They’re built the way they are for a reason, and that reason is that if it doesn’t fit then it’s not meant to fit.  Either it’s not compatible or you’re trying to fit a right bit but in the wrong place.  Either way, if you try and force it, you’ll either wreck it, or the rest of your PC or both.  Probably both.  Voltage going where voltage isn’t supposed to go owing to short circuits is not good.

Unfortunately I see a lot of penny pinching.  “Oh, don’t bother paying that guy a fee, I can tell you how to do it for free.”  Problem is, if that advise is flawed – like this was – then you’ve not only thrown away the expensive upgrade but you might have wrecked your PC too, and your friend isn’t going to stump up the money for a new one.  After all, if you take a friends advise, there’s no liability there.  No way you can prove it.  And no chance of a refund, you’d get laughed out of the store if you tried to take that back.

Ultimately, it’s your choice.  Take a gamble or get a professional.  All or nothing.  But if you lose – don’t expect even the best of tech professionals to be able to bail you out of THIS kind of mistake.  It ain’t happening.

This is absolutely fascinating:

Researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland have found that robots equipped with artificial neural networks and programmed to find “food” eventually learned to conceal their visual signals from other robots to keep the food for themselves. The results are detailed in an upcoming PNAS study.

Although I have to wonder, is it really a lie or is it just evolved selfishness as a mechanism for “survival”?  The robots are programmed to find food, a kind of “find the food or starve to death” directive.  I don’t find it surprising that these robots determine they have a better chance of survival if they don’t tell everyone else where the food is.  I wonder if some will “evolve” to signal where poison is, in order to bump off the opposition.  If this becomes the case, it starts raising interesting ethical questions about neural networks.

Maybe all those films where the neural network decides humankind is a threat or unnecessary to its own survival aren’t too far off the mark…