A particularly nasty hoax has been spreading itself around the internet via spam messages to countless E-Gold account holders. The message claims that E-Gold founder Douglas Jackson was shot and killed by a police deputy on Friday evening. Here’s one of the emails that C4G Forum members have received :

E-gold founder, Douglas Jackson, 51, of Sheridan, Mont., was 4 times shot and killed Friday night on the Seventh Street ramp at East Seventh Avenue by off-duty County Deputy Daniel Montana Jr., police said. A spokesman for the Jackson’s family told Fox 31 that the autopsy details show the shots came from 3 to 7 feet away and were fired at a level angle, not from someone lying on the ground. The investigation is ongoing, said DA spokeswoman Pam Russell. More details at hyipops.com

This spam email is completely unfounded and the sources (hyipops.com or tellhyip.com in other spam emails) have zero credibility. There is no truth at all to this spam hoax and the people who have launched it should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Although many E-Gold account holders are aware that Jackson is not from Montana, evidently there are many who are oblivious to details. If you receive this hoax spam message, just dump it, it’s not true.

Update: The two sites listed in the spam hoax email (hyipops.com and tellhyip.com) are actually passing a Trojan to visitors’ browsers, so *DO NOT* visit the sites under any circumstances. Please see the report here.

MySpace.com, the world’s most obnoxious social network, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation won a ruling today to have the domain name myspace.co.uk turned over to them, even though the uk domain was registered in 1997, six year before Myspace was founded. The ruling (pdf) was made by independent expert Antony Gold as part of the arbitration process run by the .uk domain registry, Nominet.

Total Web Solutions (TWS) of Stockport had registered myspace.co.uk in 1997 and used the address to offer mini websites to subscribers and email services. It said that though it no longer offers the mini websites it still provides email services to 18 subscribers at the address. As part of the judgment against TWS, was the fact the domain appears to be parked yet derives income from PPC (Pay Per Click) advertisments displayed to visitors of the page. When contacted by Myspace, TWS had sought up to £220,000 in return for the domain, however, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, being the devouring corporation that it is refused topay TWS for the transfer of the domain and elected to take TWS to court regarding the matter.

TWS claims that it had used the myspace.co.uk page for advertising previous to the News Corp acquisition. “The Respondent has not done anything other than to continue the uses or its domain name myspace.co.uk which it commenced in July 2004 or earlier, before it knew of the Complainant and before it acquired any rights in the descriptive name “MySpace” in the UK. Though TWS recognised that the nature of the advertising changed, it said it did not control the advertisments displayed on the site and that it should not be punished for the popularity of MySpace. Gold said that it was not relevant that TWS did not select specific adverts, that it owned the pages displayed and must be responsible for them and the income it gained from association with MySpace.

“This advantage and the use made of the Domain Name by the Respondent is unfair,” he ruled. “The income the Respondent is deriving from its pay per click links at the site of the Domain Name derives in part as a consequence of it being able to trade off the reputation of the Complainant. Accordingly the Domain Name in the hands of the Respondent is an Abusive Registration.”

This case is unprecedented in that it shows sufficient evidence that (in the UK at least), registration of a domain name does not constitute a copyright or informal trademark based on conception date. Although common sense would dictate that TWS should essentially own the informal trademarks to the term “MySpace”, it just goes to show how a corporation like News Corp can bully anybody around. The fact that News Corp refused to pony up a measley £220,000 for the co.uk domain name is ridiculous considering how much money the corporate giant rakes in with their sensationalistic news networks. Shame on MySpace and News Corp for trampling on entrepeneurs and shame on the people who ruled in favor of MySpace on this judgement.

I’ve finally figured out where all the scammers go to create those fake names you see in their whois domain registration details. Here’s a site that will generate fake name and address in a variety of countries, languages and in male or female gender (great for all those cross dressing scammers like Jack Cobb and Lee Smith). Not only that, it will generate fake social security number for US residents, or Visa number for Non-US, it even generates a mother’s maiden name !!! Check it out, it’s pretty funny…

Fake Name Generator

I chose to be a male, of Slovenian heritage living in Denmark and this is what it gave me…

I’ve always dreamed of being a French female living in Switzerland, don’t ask me why, it’s just a little fantasy but the amazing Fake Name Generator gave me the identity I’ve always imagined.

Too cool !!!! Have fun with it !!!

We just received this ridiculous phishing scheme email that appeared to originate from Yahoo and requests the recipient to send their information so a representative can call them to claim the prize. Wow, a prize of £500,000.00 would be approximately $1,014,497.16 USD at the current conversion rate of 1 GBP = 2.02899 USD. that seems like quite a lot of money to win from Yahoo. However, one look at the contents tells you that this is nothing but another phishing scheme designed to scam unsuspecting internet users. We’ve actually been receiveing quite a few of these lottery type phishing email of recent and I’ve seen two different news stories on people who’ve fallen for these scheme. The majority of the originate from Nigeria and believe it or not, clever scammers have setup entire offices staffed with employees with computers who do nothing all day but send these spam emails and answer phones when a victim calls thinking they’ve won a prize. A look at the complete headers for this particular email shows it was generated from a webserver located in the United Arab Emirates on the DigitalSkys network: from 86.62.13.126 ([86.62.13.126]) by russianhillbookstore.com and the fact it’s using a yahoo.co.uk email address would make a victim think the phishing email had come from the United Kingdom.

Please beware of these lottery type of phishing emails. They will ask you to wire them funds or send them a check in order for you to claim your prize. You will be bilked out of your money and you’ll receive nothing in return. It never suprises me how many people actually fall for these schemes, but just remember, if you really have won some type of lottery, you will not be emailed notification and you will never be asked to send any money to claim your prize.

The Forex market is one of the largest worldwide trading markets and is one of the most popular for scammers to exploit innocent and niave victims. Combined with the anonymity of the internet, many con artists and criminals have found it easy to steal large sums of money from investors using the guise of Forex trading as a sales pitch for a scam or ponzi scheme. In an effort to enlighten anybody who stumbles across this blog, I’m going to give some basics on preventing yourself from being a victim of fraud by way of Forex Trading.

What is Forex Trading?

Forex is the act of trading of foreign currencies. Much as on the stock market, an investor will buy and sell a stock to make a profit or cut a loss, the Foreign Exchange (or FX market) is similar except you are not trading stocks, you are trading actual foreign currency. Various economic conditions create a leverage value between currencies of various countries allowing Forex traders to buy and sell currencies and make a profit. Forex is an extremely volatile market and the profit margins are very small compared to the amount of money necessary to make a profit. Unfortunately, the Forex market has always been the bread and butter for scammers who are out there looking for inexperienced people to sucker into their schemes and rip them off.

How Do I Spot a Forex Scam?

If a person, website or program you are dealing claims to be trading Forex to pay back guaranteed unreasonable rates any higher than a few percent per week, it is more than likely you’re looking at a Forex scam. Especially is they use the word “guaranteed”, run away and save your money. Nothing in the investment world is “guaranteed” and the only guarantee is that you will be ripped off in the end, usually after you have been baited into investing more money than you could afford to lose.

If you are dealing with an autosurf program that claims to be trading Forex to pay you returns, again, it is a scam and you will eventually be left holding the bag. Over the last few years, autosurfs such as Surf2Prosperity, DadnDaves, PhoenixSurf and many others have run with millions of dollars of investors money based on claims that the “admins” of these programs were expert Forex traders capable of sustaining daily profits of up to 12%. Simple math will clue you into the fact that anybody who could trade Forex at a 12% per day profit margin could eventually destabilize the world economy with a few years given the initial capital. Imagine if an imaginary trader named Lee Smith or Dave Cannard had $1 million in investors money to trade with, at the rate of 12% per day, that person would be making $120,000 per day profits. Actually, think again, after day 1, the trader whould have $1,120,000 to trade with and the second days profit would be $134,400, giving the trader $1,254,400 on day 3 where the profits would be $150,528. It’s easy to see how quickly at this rate that our expert trader would be into the billions of dollars within 62 days. I made this imaginary Interest Calculator that demonstrates exactly how ridiculous these type of claims are for those of you who are not mathematically inclined.

Once again, you can apply the old adage, if it looks to good to be true, it is.

Forex Signals and Forex Trading Systems

Maybe you’ve seen all the offers for Forex Signals and Forex Trading Systems littered about the internet. Probably you’ve noticed the hefty proce commanded for these training materials and maybe you’ve even thought about buying them. Well, save your money. One of the biggest myths in the Forex market is “signals”, which are essentially buy and sell points that will supposedly guarantee you a profit in the Forex market but more often than not, they will be bogus and cost you not only the price of the signal, they will cost you your investment. Not all companies offering Forex Signals are inaccurate, there are legit sources for signals out there but unless you’re hanging around where the real traders ply their trade it’s highly unlikely a novice will ever get a valid signal. As for Forex Trading Systems, all you have to do is use logic and realize that if somebody actually had a system that guaranteed them continual profit, do you really think they would be marketing it to strangers on the internet? Professional Forex traders are not likely to give up there secrets for a few hundred dollars because if everybody were using the same system, if there was a system that worked, the whole world would be billionaires like Warren Buffet. in fact, if there were a system that worked, don’t you think Warren Buffet or George Soros wouldn’t go out of their way to obtain the exclusive rights to it ?

If you are interested in learning to trade Forex and think you might have an aptitude and the intestinal fortitude for it, there are many freely avaliable sources that you can start the learning process.

I just received the following spam email this morning…

Please be warned of these Chinese E-Gold Exchange scammers. To begin with, everybody knows that exchanging E-Gold to Paypal violates Paypal’s TOS and your Paypal account will be locked if they find out you have exchanged with these scammers. Second, these criminals have just registered their domain name 3 days ago and are already sending spam email to facilitate their scam. Here’s a bit of their whois records….

Lastly, they are offering 25% or 30% bonus for each exchange, which I would assume, most people would realize this is a scam on that fact alone. There is no such thing as an exchanger who is going to pay you to exchange with them. If these people really needed E-Gold as stated in their spam email, they could buy it directly from Omnipay for far less of a fee.

These scammers are using the E-Gold account #1343836, and their operating email is bawokhg7@yahoo.com.

DON’T GET SCAMMED AND sPREAD THE WORD