Tag Archives: scam

Computers

HP’s Bait and Switch Tactics

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We don’t often get into the nuts and bolts of ad campaigns here on Computers Made Simple but this time we’re making an exception. Here’s how you can avoid this kind of misleading advertising when you’re looking to pick up some new piece of technology. Better yet, stop buying from the companies who use these techniques. Speak with your wallet.

1. We subscribe to an email flyer from HP (Hewlett Packard), vendors of everything from laptops to printers and everything in between. We’ve got quite a few bits and pieces of their technology, including at least three laptops. Here’s the email flyer we received yesterday morning:

Photo of HP Bait and Switch 1
What do you notice first? $349? We did.

 

The first thing we noticed was the price, $349.99. HP Notebooks starting at $349.99. Notice the asterisk? Here’s the fine print for it:

* Offer good while supplies last, and subject to change or cancellation at any time. See product page for details. Prices shown may include applicable instant savings. Restrictions apply to sale items and are subject to change without notice. Offer valid on HP clearance notebooks and desktops July 8, 2013 through July 22, 2013.

Please note the dates of the sale, July 8th to July 22nd. That’s quite a period of time, isn’t it? 14 days, two weeks, lots of time for this sale, that’s for sure.

2. Here’s what we saw when we click on the ad:

Photo of HP Bait and Switch 2
Where’s the $349.99 notebook?

 

Where is the laptop selling for $349.99? Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to exist. Next cheapest is $399.99, fifty bucks more than the advertised price. What’s going on here?

3. We Tweeted HP Support on this:

Photo of HP Bait and Switch 3
HP Canada does not have a Twitter account so we tweeted to HP Support.

 

4. After some back and forth with HPSupport on Twitter, we decided to engage the HP Live Chat feature on the HP site. Here’s the conversation (a long read but useful if you’re ever thinking of using Live Chat with a product rep):

Start: __________

Welcome to the HP Shopping Canada Chat Service.

You are connected with HP Shopping Canada Chat Service. My name is ‘Peter’. How may I help you today?

Peter: Hi!
you: I received the Summer Stock Blowout email. It mentions notebooks starting at $349
you: I click on the email and see nothing at $349, cheapest on the page is $399
you: what’s up with that?
Peter: I appreciate your interest in HP!!
Peter: let me check on that, just a moment please..
you: ok
Peter: Thanks for being online.
Peter: Please have a look at HP Pavilion Chromebook 14-c010us Notebook PC – D1A48UA. It cost around $ 329.99
Peter: HP Pavilion Chromebook 14-c010us Notebook PC – Click here
you: I know, I found some at $299 but I am not looking for a Chromebook. The email said ‘notebook’ and $349 with a link to a page. That page did not have anything at $349, cheapest was $399. Something’s not right about that, in my opinion.
you: If it is a Chromebook, you should specify that.
you: Chromebooks are very limited, your notebooks aren’t.
Peter: One moment please..
Peter: Thanks for being online.
Peter: I have double checked on this, HP 2000-2c20ca Notebook PC is cheapest(cost) notebook model cost around $ 399
Peter: HP 2000-2c20ca Notebook PC – Click here
you: the one show on the linked page is the same price and it has 6GB of ram and a better processor.
you: http://h20386.www2.hp.com/CanadaStore/Merch/Product.aspx?sel=PCNB&id=C2N57UA&opt=ABL&p=clearance-sale
you: but it is 399 not 349 as the email suggested
Peter: Do you received any promo code in that e-mail?
you: and it’s on clearance, the one you described is regular price
you: there is no promo code in the email. “Scorching deals on notebooks’
you: it’s titled Summer stock blowout
you: I can’t copy and paste into this, can I?
Peter: No, you can’t..
you: should I email it back to you?
you: (Hewlett-Packard@canada.newsgram.hp.com
you: that’s who it’s from
you: that’s you, isn’t it?
you: there is a monitor code but I don’t need a monitor
you: MONITOR25 is that code
Peter: Please hold on..
Peter: Scorching deals on Notebooks for HP Pavilion g6-2240ca Notebook PC is $ 399 only not $349. It’s original cost is $ 469.99 and 15% discount for the product.
Peter: http://h20386.www2.hp.com/CanadaStore/Merch/Show.aspx?p=clearance-sale&jumpid=re_r11391_ca/en/hpshopping/clearance_sale_banner/20130708
you: I know that. I have already told you that.
you: There is NO notebook for $349, that’s what I’m trying to tell you.
you: the email says $349 but there is nothing at that price. The cheapest on the linked page is $399
you: maybe I’m not making myself clear here.
Peter: One moment please..
Peter: For that, let me help you with the direct contact information of our dedicated experts who can confirm you on your mail discount details.
Peter: Our dedicated sales team experts can be reached at 1-877-231-4351.
you: So you are saying that you don’t believe the price in the email? You are suggesting that I am not being honest?
Peter: No, I can able to assist you with the online details only..

End ________________________

Ummmm, weren’t we asking about the online details? Hello! You’ll note that Peter dodged the question completely, offering a Chromebook that was not on sale and, in our opinion, is not a ‘notebook’. Chromebooks are locked into Google, have very small SSD drives and only work when you are online, making them useless when you travel. They are no better than a tablet or a smartphone, for us anyway.

5. At this point we decided to call the number that we were given. After a short wait, Ken came on and reported that the $349.99 computers had been sold out, there were none left. We asked if there would be any consideration on the $399.99 laptop that was now the least expensive on there. Ken explained that the price was fixed and there would be no further reduction.

6. The point of all of this is that the sale runs for two weeks. We clicked on the ad very early in the morning of July 8th. How is it possible that the highlighted laptop could be sold out in a matter of minutes. Honestly, $349.99 is not an earth-shattering price. We’ve seen perfectly good laptops for $249.99 at other online retail sites. To us, this is an obvious ‘bait and switch’ attempt by HP, advertising a low price but switching us to a more expensive model. In most countries this type of advertising is illegal. Other retailers that we use keep the sold out items on their sites, simply to avoid this kind of situation.

Update: 

This morning, July 9th, HP has updated their site. Instead of offering a replacement for the $349.99 laptop, they put the sold out one back on the list. Check the red availability icon:

Photo of HP Bait and Switch 4
Wow! Oh right…it’s sold out. Ouch!

Now, the question we have is this: Did HP put the cheap laptop back because of the storm that we raised or did other consumers ask the same questions?

HP is a Fortune 500 company. They make decent laptops, desktops, printers and scanners plus a host of other technology. As far as running online ads, however, they seem no better than a Ma and Pa one store shop, putting up ads to get sales using an obvious, and illegal, bait and switch technique. Truly, this is a caveat emptor case if we’ve ever seen one.

Thanks for reading! Think very carefully about doing business with HP in the future. Their technology is decent but their online store isn’t. If you decide to support HP by buying one of their products, buy it somewhere else. In Canada, we highly recommend Future Shop.

 

Domain Registration, Phishing Scams, Rip Offs, Spam

Domain Name Scam – look out for this one

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We own quite a few domain names here at Computers Made Simple. All are registered with one company, all are up to date and all are set to automatically renew on their respective anniversary dates. We get substantial amounts of email from our domain company but we also get emails from the vulture service that is known as ‘Domain Service’.

 

This particularly loathsome outfit scours the web for domains that are about to expire. Once they find such a domain, they send out an email, from a hotmail account if you can believe it, that looks like this:

Photo of Domain Name Scam 1
This looks vaguely like a domain renewal notice.

 

Next, farther down the email, comes the prices:

Photo of Domain Name Scam 2
Ridiculous prices for nothing, absolutely nothing.

 

Lastly, here is a description (in fine print) of what this email is actually soliciting:

Photo of Domain Name Scam 3
This is a ‘search engine submission’, something that is completely unnecessary these days.

 

Once you read the fine print, you’ll see that this is just another scam. With the likes of Google and Bing, there is no need for ‘search engine submission’ at all. Additionally, this looks vaguely like a domain registration renewal, doesn’t it? Even if it it was, the prices are at least three times higher than any other company out there. There is no ‘lifetime’ renewal, by the way.

The big clue in this would be the originating email address. We can guarantee that no reputable company uses a hotmail address. The web is full of scams like this. We’ll try to help you identify them as they come to our attention.

Thanks for reading!

Email, Phishing Scams

Track Down a Suspicious Email

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We received a very suspicious email this morning. On the surface, it looked innocent enough but the clue that told it was a ‘phishing’ email was simple. The email was from Air Canada, Canada’s national airline but the person who received it does not fly…ever. Here’s how we figured it all out. This is the email we received:

Photo of Email 1
Here is the subject line.

 

Photo of Email 2
Here is the email itself. Hotmail has prevented some of it from loading.

If we had recently booked tickets, this email might have tricked us into clicking the links in it. Where do the links lead? Let’s check. If you hover your cursor over each link, you will be able to see the actual link that it leads to. Please don’t make a mistake and click on the link. Ever! This is what we saw when we hovered over the links:

Photo of Email 3
Look down that the very bottom of your browser. See where it says ‘www.lakewoodpool.com/PDF/ticketRX749CA.zip ? Nothing to do with Air Canada there.

 

Photo of Email 4
This one has a contact PDF file which probably has a piece of malware in it.

 

Neither link leads to the Air Canada website. We didn’t click on the links but we did open up a new browser window and typed in ‘www.lakewoodpool.com’. This is what we found:

Photo of Email 5
This website is real but it’s out of date. It hasn’t been updated since January 2010.

We showed you how to check the IP address of a suspicious email here: Check IP Address  First we checked the email source by right clicking the closed email in the junk mail folder. (This is how to do it in Hotmal/Outlook/Live  but your email system may vary. It may not be the same as this but EVERY email system allows you to check the source of any email you receive.) Here is the menu you’re looking for:

Photo of Email 8
Choose ‘View message source’.

 

This is what you see next. Yes, it looks like gibberish but all you have to look for are the numbers that are marked in blue here. Highlight them (click just to the left of the first number, keep the mouse button pressed and drag to the right until you get to the end of the last number, then release your mouse:

Photo of Email 6
Near the top, look for ‘(sender IP is …) That set of numbers is the sender’s IP address.

Next, we headed to http://whois.net/ip-address-lookup/  to find where that IP address is in the world. Whois is a Unix term which is a command, asking literally ‘who is this?’ Here’s what we found:

Photo of Email 9
This IP address is in France…a long way from Canada.

 

We went through this exercise to prove to you that the email in question is a fraud, a phishing email. The senders expected us to click the links and subsequentlydownload their malware. Once our computer is infected with the malware, they could either take control of our computer or gather information about our identity. Identity theft is much more common now than any other kind of criminal activity.

Besides all of this, the email had many clues in it that, hopefully, would make you suspicious.

Clues that an email a fraud or a phishing scam: 

1. If indeed we had purchased a ticket from Air Canada, they would have our name, right? Air Canada or any other company would not send us an email with the opening line: Dear customer.

2. We hadn’t purchased a plane ticket. That’s simple but important. If you haven’t purchased anything from a company but they send you an email which says you have, you can be pretty sure that it’s spam or a phishing scam. This goes for banks, shipping companies and ticket outlets.

3. The links in the email did not lead to an Air Canada site. Hover over any link in the email, then look down near the bottom of your browser window. The real link address will be there. Whatever you do, do not click on any link in any email that you think is suspicious.

4. One of the links contained a zip or compressed file. Malware can be sent via PDFs but usually it is sent in a zip file.

The Lakewoodpool.com site has been hacked by someone, that’s obvious. It hasn’t been updated for two years but someone has guessed the administrator’s password and taken control of the site. Once inside the host server, the criminal is able to send out emails such as this from anywhere in the world.

Hopefully, we’ve educated you a bit in figuring out what an fraudulent email looks like. If you have questions or comments, use the form at the bottom.

Thanks for reading!

 

Facebook, Facebook Tricks, Scam, Security

Facebook Scams – Don’t fall for them

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Don’t respond or click on any link that you get from Facebook, unless you are 100% sure it is from Facebook. Here’s why:

1. We got this email today in one of our junkmail folders:

Photo of junk mail from Facebook
Looks legitimate, right?

2. We do have a Facebook account for this email address but we rarely use it. We’ve got our email settings in this Facebook account set to never send email. We also don’t know anyone named Christine McLain Gibbs.

3. We didn’t click on the link, that’s for sure. But we were curious as to how this think worked. We knew it was a scam but didn’t know what it was supposed to do. The links led to the following address: (We’ve left spaces in it so it doesn’t work and don’t try to make a link out of it) http://www.  unitedtec.org  /mobile.html

Our browser asked if we wanted to use Java when we pasted the link into a new window. We didn’t allow it and after a few seconds, we were taken to a real Facebook page. We assume the link sucked Facebook passwords from our cache using Java. Even though we didn’t allow Java to run, we changed our Facebook password anyway.

4. Unitedtec.org is a legitimate site, we think. It seems to be some sort of religious, Christian teen site. The url in the IP address leads to Site5 hosting. We’ve notified both of these sites in the hopes that these emails can be stopped.

If you remember to never click an email link from Facebook, you’ll be safe. Good luck!

Thanks for reading!