Perhaps. But then again, perhaps not.
With a name like Cash Blaster Pro, how can one have doubts that someone somewhere is up to no good in a good old-fashioned dastardly manner ala Snidely Whiplash?
And so it goes . . .
. . . like this ---
--------------------------------------------------------------------
After being spammed relentlessly about this so called opportunity I deceided to take a look at it and will http://www.123cheapdomains.com
Phone support available 10AM-6PM PST Mon-Fri
This company may be contacted for domain login/passwords,
DNS/Nameserver changes, and general domain support questions.
Own A Custom Web Address For Less!
$13.95/yr Domain Registration
-------------------------------------------------
Includes:
- Free domain forwarding / redirection
- Free URL Masking / Framing with Meta Tag Support
- Free DNS services(mx, ip, cname pointing)
--------------------------------------------------
Registrar of Record: TUCOWS, INC.
Record last updated on 01-May-2008.
Record expires on 20-Jan-2009.
Record created on 20-Jan-2008.
Registrar Domain Name Help Center:
http://domainhelp.tucows.com
Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.WEB2UPGRADE.COM
NS2.WEB2UPGRADE.COM
[/i]
OK now notice the bolded entry in the Whois result which shows stilladreamr@yahoo.com, this is the main email address of the administrator. Hmmm, a company that is going to give away a million dollars that uses a free yahoo email address? Now I am becoming curious and wondering if this might be a scam.
Next I try a search for the email address in google, http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%...mr@yahoo.com%22 which you can try for yourself. I found the domain whois info which is fairly common but what caught my eye was the result at the bottom.
For Sale Wanted... to buy an XS650 custom chopper/bobber, or anything like this - please send details, pics, asking price and location to stilladreamr@yahoo.com - THANKS ...
www.650motorcycles.com/ForSale.html - 120k - Cached - Similar pages
http://www.650motorcycles.com/ForSale.html
Here is the full ad
Wanted: I am looking to buy an XS650 custom chopper/bobber, or anything like this - please send details, pics, asking price and location to stilladreamr@yahoo.com - THANKS
We now do a search of just stilladreamr
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=s...G=Google+Search
and we find an interesting link to a bike site for Yamaha XS650 buyers, remember the previous site where he was looking for a Yamaha XS650?
Information for Yamaha XS 650 buyers Classic Bike PictureseBay Feedback Profile for stilladreamr. Buyer: usaf936 ( 4 ) Dec-07-07 14:56. yamaha xs 650 flasher relay stock oem xs650 (#300155020688) . ...
classicbikepictures.co.uk/c319/p2390/buyers/information_for_yamaha xs_650_buyers.html - 34k - Cached - Similar pages
http://classicbikepictures.co.uk/c319/p239...650_buyers.html
Now a look on this page reveals the following
eBay Feedback Profile for stilladreamr
Buyer: usaf936 ( 4 ) Dec-07-07 14:56. yamaha xs 650 flasher relay stock oem xs650 (#300155020688) ... Detailed item information is available for 90 days. ...
which indicates our million dollar giveaway internet technician has an ebay account. Let's see if we can get a better idea about this person from those who have previously done business with him to try and guage his integrity.
http://feedback.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?...eedbackAsSeller
Ooops It appears that he is no longer a registered user because his feedback fell below the accepted level causing ebay to terminate his account.
stilladreamr ( 144) Not a registered user
OK so let's take a look at some of the Negative feedback on ebay and see if it was really justified or not.
They take my money but didnt send my item. Take a look at the mirror. ramistereo ( 6 ) Dec-21-07 09:16
-- (#300158421366)
After over 2 months still waitting. No answer to my emails. ramistereo ( 6 ) Dec-21-07 09:16
-- (#300158081583) --
The salesman did not send the item, does not obtain contact per 90 days, CARE. joaquimcarlos2006 ( 24) Dec-13-07 06:30
-- (#300158423276)
Never received the items rolfg3495 ( 21) Dec-08-07 15:00
-- (#300159680522) --
Never received the items rolfg3495 ( 21) Dec-08-07 15:00
-- (#300159679220) --
Scum, liar, THIEF!!!! Nothing else describes him/ her better. glenmaniac ( 165) Dec-02-07 15:18
-- (#300161690162) --
this seller not send the items mc-bror ( 322) Nov-26-07 10:30
-- (#300159681972) --
the seller not send the items mc-bror ( 322) Nov-26-07 10:29
-- (#300159679528)
After 3 emails no response from seller. Item not received. Very disappointed! purplecoyote112 ( 253) Nov-23-07 07:54
-- (#300157042984) --
Never received item I have paid for, no more e-mail reply, might be a scam abeblinkin ( 25) Nov-20-07 14:24
-- (#300152077622) --
Paid Imeadiately,never received part, no reply on emails after 1 month. chevysong ( 44) Nov-17-07 18:56
-- (#300155021640) --
item not recieved and no anser to my emails frankw6963 ( 54) Nov-17-07 11:10
-- (#300155386595)
Never received Total owed after 7 dys. Moved on to different seller. LOSER! lipbrother ( 76) Nov-06-07 08:00
-- (#300158388885) --
Paid through paypal then seller sends me a cod for 100.00 30 days late! Scammer! cyclefreak1965 ( 402) Nov-01-07 11:37
-- (#300159681729)
RECIEVED 2 DEFECTIVE HORNS! NO RESPONSE FROM SELLER! 9412walter ( 153) Oct-26-07 12:56
-- (#300155807789) --
PAID FOR ITEMS PROMPTLY! NEVER RECIEVED ITEM! 9412walter ( 153) Oct-26-07 12:53
-- (#300155817538) --
paid for items promptly.....NEVER RECIEVD ITEMS, STILL DONT HAVE THEM! 9412walter ( 153) Oct-26-07 12:51
-- (#300155816222)
Hmmm obviously his customers don't think very highly of him or his honesty and neither do ebay so this gives us a pretty good indication that the claims on his site are likely to be completely false and that he is likely to be completely untrustworthy and most likely a scammer who doesn't deliver on his promises if ebay is anything to go by.
On this page http://feedback.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?...s=25&page=6 of his ebay feedback I noticed it said
Robert over at Crazy Horse Customs is AWESOME!! Great Ebayer, Great motorcycles, toddster-123 ( 15) Sep-04-07 10:49
-- (#300144736541) --
So I googled "Crazy Horse Customs" and Robert.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=C...+Customs+robert
We find crazyhorsecustoms.com but alas it is just a holding page because it requires renewing but is however registed via 123CHEAPDOMAINS.COM just like his other myriad of domain names.
The Registry database contains ONLY .COM, .NET, .EDU domains and
Registrars.Registrant:
Crazy Horse Customs
NW 91st Ave 3-214
Coral Springs, FL 33071
US
Domain name: CRAZYHORSECUSTOMS.COM
Administrative Contact:
Horse, Crazy sales@crazyhorsecustoms.com
NW 91st Ave 3-214
Coral Springs, FL 33071
US
+1.9547532305
I also found this in the same results and again relates to Yamaha XS650 mororcycles.
MySpaceTV Videos: XS650 Yamaha Chopper by RobertSep 25, 2007 ... XS650 Yamaha Chopper by Robert Watch it on MySpace Videos. ... At Crazy Horse Customs (www.crazyhorsecustoms.com) we take a stock XS650 ...
vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=18851725 - 34k - Cached - Similar pages
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseacti...ideoid=18851725
where it describes Robert as being:
39 years old
FORT LAUDERDALE
US
Total Plays 2
Subscribers 1
and has his picture.
50 Yamaha Chopper
1:21
This is a great example of an XS650 Chopper. At Crazy Horse Customs (www . crazyhorsecustoms . com) we take a stock XS650 Yamaha and chop and bob it into either a hard-tail chopper or soft-tail bobber. You can see examples of our bikes at the link above. [less]
Type www.robertkuntz.com into your web browser and it will forward to cashblasterpro.com
Administrative Contact:
Kuntz, Robert stilladreamr@yahoo.com
1560 NW 128th DR #108
Sunrise, FL 33323
US
+1.9545984344
Now we google for that domain name
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%...ertkuntz.com%22
and we find this link.
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseacti...logID=358245514
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fusea...endID=333999358
http://www.myspace.com/homebizguru
"MISSION: Take Over the World!"
Male
39 years old
ALTAMONTE SPRINGS, Florida
United States
Last Login: 5/3/2008
On the original stilladreamr search I found
http://www.flickr.com/photos/25044614@N07/
stilladreamr's photostream
Sets Tags Archives Favorites Profile
Guest Passes let you share your photos that aren't public.
Anyone can see your public photos anytime, whether they're a Flickr member or not. But! If you want to share photos marked as friends, family or private, use a Guest Pass.
If you're sharing photos from a set, you can create a Guest Pass that includes any of your photos marked as friends, family, or private. If you're sharing your entire photostream, you can create a Guest Pass that includes photos marked as friends or family (but not your private photos).
Learn more about Guest Passes![?]
pretty lat/longjittercup
JitterCup Social Networking Community coming May 1st! New technology that will change the web1
Hmmm ok it sounds remarkably similar to his other blurb for july 1st and has an image that says www.jittercup.com on it.
http://jittercup.com/
Welcome...
This is the development site for JitterCup.com
Please keep posted for our official launch of May 1st 2008!
Regards,
JitterCup Admin
Domain name: JITTERCUP.COM
Administrative Contact:
Kuntz, Robert robert@robertkuntz.com
1560 NW 128th DR #108
Sunrise, FL 33323
US
+1.4074850101
Again this is registered via the same registrar, could this be the amazing new Web 2.0 technology he boasts about. May the 1st has been and gone, maybe he is now trying to re-market this flop to you guys, next there will be some kind of fee to pay, can anyone say hold on to your wallet because this smells like a HUGE scam?
Anyone can perform these searches and will get the same results and I am sure you will reach the conclusion through research, common sense and logic that cashblasterpro and all it's other url's is just a scam waiting to happen. In essence people are promoting this joke with the expectation of receiving a cut of 1 million dollars, it is almost a mirror image of the greenzap scam where you will get nothing unless you either pay or you get others to pay. Just wait and see if you don't believe me.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
This info came from Scam.com. And I found that js at 9PlanetReviews also posted the same excerpt from Scam.com with the following preface ---
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Just got the below from my upline. Turns out that the “switch to Web 2.0” programme is a scam. I myself wondered how one could change all websites on the ‘net by the click of one button. I don’t think it is technically feasible, but.. I thought it was no harm, as they open on July 1st. Well, I’ve had many folks join. And read the below and decide for yourself.
“Hello Gang,
Just a quick heads up and an apology to anyone who joined the following program under me. It has come to my attention that a program I heavily promoted is looking like it is a scam. The program is cashblasterpro and promises to upgrade the entire internet to web 2.0 at the click of a button. I should probably have known better and apologise to all who joined this program under me. If you have joined under me please do not upgrade your accounts or recruit anymore members and please pass this message that was posted in the mmg forum to all your friends and acquaintences to warn them about it. The message is below and the research was remarkably simple to duplicate. It offers compelling evidence that this program is a scam.
Again I apologise to anyone who joined this program under me and urge you not to give any of your money to these scumbag scammers. Luckily we caught this one early and if we spread the word fast we can ensure that nobody gets hurt. Please forward this message to everyone you know or post it to any of the forums or message boards you might use to stop others from being scammed by this scam artist.
I try my best to only bring profitable and honest programs to you but everyone makes mistakes sometimes, this was my mistake and I am only glad that it is not too late to fix it.
Thank You All
God Bless
--------------------------------------------------------------------
And, faithful Chaos Chasm II readers, there's more still, from Gerry Patterson at PGTS Humble Blog, posted there June 26th, so its very recent, just last Thursday (today being Monday the 30th, right? [and CBP was supposedly going to be launching tomorrow]) ---
--------------------------------------------------------------------
On Thursday the 12th of June, I started to receive a lot of spam claiming to be from Robert Kuntz and BJ Bishop. It was coming mostly from non-portable addresses, and it was very aggressive. Although Spam Assassin was diverting the spam to my spam folder, I was concerned about the sheer volume. In order to stop it I black-banned the offending IP addresses in the postfix access DB.
This incident prompted me to finish a script that I had been working on for a while. It is a perl script that automatically black-bans offenders for 24 hours. I call this the SA (Spam Assassin) Sin Bin. As I have become confident of the fact that Spam Assassin will not return false positives (because I've tuned it that way), I now feel sanguine about implementing this script. I will try to release details of it soon.
I was so busy with the technicalities that I didn't bother checking further about Robert Kuntz and BJ Bishop. At the time I had thought it might be an early Friday the 13th type jape, which spammers seem to think is so amusing.
It turns out this was the work of a nest of very bold spammers. The domain which they were promoting, cashblasterpro.com, makes little attempt to hide itself or their operations and their phony, scamming, scummy intent. Their sites (and affiliated sites) are chock full of the most blatant, outrageous bullshit, sprinkled with technical jargon, that I have encountered this year. I won't even dignify the load of bollocks on their sites further by commenting on it. If you are curious go and visit them. Just be careful if you are low-level Microsoftie using IE. These guys are just the type to deploy rat-cunning malware dirty tricks against unwary visitors. It would be a lot safer to go to scam.com and read the thread about Robert (if that is his actual name) and his activities.
Cashblasterpro.com is registered by our old friends TUCOWS Inc, as are the domains robertkuntz.com and bjbishop.com.
Robert Kuntz (if that really is his name) is listed as the administrative contact for the cashblasterpro.com domain. The details are as follows:
Robert Kuntz
1560 NW 128th DR #108
Sunrise, FL 33323 US
BJ Bishop, if that really is his name, is listed as the administrative contact for bjbishop.com, also at the same Florida address:
Bishop, BJ
1560 NW 128th DR #108
Sunrise, FL 33323 US
Laura Lynch (if that is a real person) is also mentioned as someone who helped design these sites. Seems she works at the same address.
Another domain registered at this address is web2upgrade.com. Both web2upgrade.com and cashblasterpro.com use the same primary and secondary nameservers (ns11.cashblasterpro.com and ns12.cashblasterpro.com) Robertkuntz.com and bjbishop.com use the nameservers ns1.web2dashboard.com and ns2.web2dashboard.com.
Web2dashboard.com is another domain administered by our old mate Robert Kuntz, and operating from the same Florida address. It must be one busy little place there in Florida, operating all of those domains.
These sites appear to use a San Fancisco company, 123cheapdomains.com as their ISP. All of them are registered by TUCOWS Inc.
That busy little location in Florida appears to be a genuine address in Fort Lauderdale. Or at least Google Earth will take me there. It does seem strange that the address is in the middle of the road rather than one of the buildings. But maybe it's a very mobile operation.
It looks as if there is a block of offices close by. I cannot tell if there is an actual sign saying "Cashblasterpro.com", since Google Earth will not show me a street view. But the aerial view shows only a few car parking spots out the back. I don't know how all those people, Robert, BJ and their helper Laura and their staff and all the staff for web2upgrade.com and web2dashboard.com, robertkuntz.com, bjbiship.com, etc all fit in that tiny little space ... Especially if they really do work in the middle of the road!
It seems that Robert (if that is his real name) started out with the email address of stilladreamr@yahoo.com, which he has used as the Administrative contact for many of his domains.
It also seems at one stage, stilladreamr had an eBay account. However the account was suspended for non-compliance. He may have had an interest in motorcycles.
There is also a veritable splodge of sploggers (if I can coin a collective noun), creating bogus entries in various blogs about what a great new technology Robert and his spammer buddies have discovered and how they are going to make you rich, if you just give them your personal details. When I googled for Robert Kuntz (how do you pronounce that?) I found ample evidence of splogging.
The scam is a type of pyramid scheme, that these days is often referred to as Multi-Level Marketing (MLM). It probably also includes harvesting email addresses, credit card numbers and personal information. In the past they may have been involved with the mortgage spammers, who always had a strong presence in Florida. The mortgage spammers seemed to have connections with organised crime as well as the more shady side of the finance sector. However that is pure speculation on my part. There is no definite evidence for the mortgage connection. Florida did seem to be a haven for mortgage spammers in the past. I imagine that the perpetrator is a small time fraudster with aspirations to make it to the big-time.
Now, you might consider me incredulous, but, I do make a living out of being a sceptic. And I couldn't help noticing that the names Robert Kuntz, BJ Bishop and Laura Lynch already have entries in Wikipedia, for different (and legitimate) activities. Which is why I suspect that these names are phony. Of course that doesn't mean the sites cannot be shut down. We know the IP addresses. We know who registered them. They can be taken down in a couple of milliseconds. We just don't know their real names and addresses.
Of course I could just be a mistrustful sceptic and there really are three conscientious little Florida citizens, Robert, BJ and little Laura, all of them working their little buns off just trying to get a sizable piece of the American dream before they retire early (with other peoples' money).
But on the other hand it would be possible to shut them down. If someone accused them of being affiliated with a weird Islamist group, they'd be off air in less time than it would take to type "Google" into "Google".
Last century, before the lawyers, scam-artists and spammers made such a big move on the Internet, a domain like cashblasterpro.com would have been taken down within a couple of hours. These days it will probably take weeks or months to shut these scam-artists down.
Of course the netblocks from which the spam originated have now changed hands.
This does not do a lot to promote confidence in the Internet or the US authorities abilities to enforce the law. It does foster Florida's inglororious reputation as the spam capital of the world and TUCOWS Inc as the spammers' preferred Registrar.
If anything it illustrates how ineffective and ineffectual US anti-spam laws are, when a crew like this can openly and persistently flout not only those laws but several other laws regarding fraud, identity theft etc.
Copyright © 2008, Gerry Patterson. All Rights Reserved.--------------------------------------------------------------------
Now, what and where is my responsibility towards all those that signed up under yours truly during the past three months to get in on this so-called Net-based Web 2.0 upgrade of the entire World Wide Web. Besides feeling abhorrently ridiculous, which I always seem able to recover from, for having bought into this scam, I feel that I should contact all those folks I made contact with on Saturday just before the pre-reg page went south. Damn, and I was looking forward to watching the second half of Season 1 of Weeds tonight. It's a good thing I didn't tell toooo many of my cynical friends about this. But I suppose I deserve to be laughed at disparagingly for a few minutes or months for not having checked out as deeply on the Net as I could have much earlier, way back in April, whether this thing was actually technically possible or not. A very cool scam, I must admit. "Bastards!" Telly Savalas would have said.
1 comment:
I started learning Chinese because I was a business student. After reaching an advanced level and making Chinese friends, I felt an intriguing insight to the culture that is pretty unique for most Americans. I stay in the environment because it is interesting and pushes me further. If I go back to the States, I feel like like is just a little too easy. Sorry, I never had much interest in Tang dynasty poetry. :0) Admirable, though!
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