[N941WR]

FYI - This is the second time I have received this email. I suspect that the questions the guy is going to ask has something to do with your checking account or credit card numbers.

Even if it is "legitimate", I wonder if the Garmin 396's are export restricted. If so, you would be breaking federal laws by sending them to him.

-----Original Message-----
From: Kenny Hayden [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Friday, May 05, 2006 3:06 PM
To: bill
Subject: order


Dear Sir/Madam

My name Kenny Hayden from Singapore.
I hope you can supply me the goods i needed here.
I need some :
# GARMIN GPS 396 (6 units)
I have questions for you before we make a deal.
- Can you ship to Singapore via FedEx International Priority?
- Do you accept Credit Card for the payment?
If you can, i'll give you my credit card and billing/shipping informations you needed to process my order.
I'm waiting for your reply soon

Regards
Kenny Hayden

 

[flyingdefinescontent]

This is the same as those "Nigerian" scams running around. Don't do it! There are similar items plastered all over Ebay too. Buyer beware!

These guys will eventually get around to conning you out of money or information or anything else they can get their hands on.

Take it from a guy who just had some British brainchild try to ease 1800 dollars out of my Paypal account, don't do it! Change those passwords every week. Don't click on stuff you don't recognize. Don't fall the for the "too good to be true" ads.

Fly safe,
Carey Bowman

 

[Jamie]

This has gotta be a scam. The XM satellites are ONLY available in North America, thus the 396 WX functionality would be useless to anyone outside the continent.

 

[rv8ch]

Stolen CCs

Those guys have got to do something with all those stolen credit card numbers they are collecting, don't they?

Actually, it's a real pain that people do things like this, since there are, from time to time, suppliers in the US that won't sell me anything since I currently live outside the US. They want me to fax them a phone bill or some other silly thing. Very annoying.

 

[Baja_Traveler]

This has gotta be a scam. The XM satellites are ONLY available in North America, thus the 396 WX functionality would be useless to anyone outside the continent.

Actually, even though XM is targeting North America as an audience base, I have heard that the signal is being picked up as far south as argentina, and as far east as England (based on DJ comments while listening to XM radio). It may be possible for an XM reciever to get a signal over there in the West Pacific. I also know from personal experience that the signal comes in strong in Hawaii...

 

[Jamie]

Wow...that's impressive that the signal can be received at such a distance.

XM uses three geostationary satellites that are designed to provide coverage for the following area:

The original intent was for 2 satellites to be launched, one for the Left coast and one for the Right coast. Boeing botched some sort of power management issue on the original two satellites and end of life has been dropped to around 2008. XM launched the third satellite and put it in the place of the satellite previously providing coverage on the left coast. The faulty satellite that was on the left coast is now moving over to the east coast and will be placed beside the unit that is currently there. The two satellites on the East coast will alternate time transmitting in order to extend their lifespans. A fourth satellite will launched to take the place of the two failing ones on the east coast.

At any rate, the two satellites are in geosynchronous orbits (at the equator, of course) and are pointed at North America. I guess at that altitude some bleedover is going to happen.

I seriously doubt that XM is feeding weather data for Singapore over their WX service. I haven't tried it myself, but I seriously doubt it as it would consume valuable bandwidth which is very limited for them.

Are you getting WX in Hawaii?

 

[kcameron]

Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see anything wrong with the inquiry from Mr Hayden. He's asks whether you can ship fedex to Singapore and whether you can accept a credit card. What's wrong with that?

 

[briand]

This has gotta be a scam. The XM satellites are ONLY available in North America, thus the 396 WX functionality would be useless to anyone outside the continent.

They will just resell them on e-bay to someone who (probably an American) who can use them. I think its just to "launder" the money that they will eventually receive from the use of a stolen CC #.

 

[SteinAir]

Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see anything wrong with the inquiry from Mr Hayden. He's asks whether you can ship fedex to Singapore and whether you can accept a credit card. What's wrong with that?

What's wrong with it is that it's a scam, and a fairly well known one at that (at least to those of us in this business). We probably get a dozen of similar emails per week, and all of them get deleted without a response....but I did read a good one from a colleague who asked if he could trade some sushi and a baby elephant!

FYI....a rather well known avionics mfgr got scammed on this last year because a secretary fell for it. Lost many thousands of $$'s in stuff, and ended up out the money and out the units....which later showed up on Ebay!

Cheers,
Stein.

 

[flyingdefinescontent]

Don't Trust Them!

I've seen dozens of these letters and the only thing that changes is the name and the country of origin. It's always the same, "Hi, I'm so and so, and I want to send you money, blah blah." In the Nigerian scams they would actually send a check which would of course turn out to be bad and they would then "need" YOUR secure information to make it valid, or they'd ask for a "deposit" to help them make the check good, or they'd blame it on someone else such as a manager or whatever and then try to hand you off to that person; it never ends. The possibilities are as endless as the creativity of the crook. In this case I'd suspect the credit card number would be stolen, as mentioned above.

Unless you have the ability to actually go to their location and meet them in person, don't do it. If you'd offer to do so it may be amusing to see how quickly their enthusiasm would fade. I feel sorry for the other folks this behavior affects, such as rv8ch there, but you have to be careful. And after you've seen enough of those scams they'll all start to look familiar regardless of the specifics.

Does it not make you even a tiny bit suspicious that someone would "cold call" you and offer their credit card info?

I see these thieves the same as I see murderers. Both want to take your time from you, just in different ways. You don't want to know what I'd do to them if I got the chance.

Ooooops, little soapbox there, I digress.

FWIW
Carey

 

[flyingdefinescontent]

Ebay Scamming.

If you go to Ebay and just do a GPS Map 396 search, you'll get a few every day. Most of the sales are fraudulent. If you click on the ones for 99 cents, you'll get a message from Ebay saying the auction was cancelled or something like that. I've been watching for a 396 every day for a few months now and those scams have been there the entire time. I wonder how many people bit on them before Ebay finally shut them down.

Most of this type of activity seems to be centered around Russia and the former Soviet Republics. I guess all that time in the bread lines gave them plenty of *ahem* food for thought as to how to go about hitting us rich folk up for our hard earned RV money.

Fly (and surf) Safe
Carey

 

[Baja_Traveler]

Jamie - I wasnt using a 396 in Hawaii (I own a 296), so I wasnt getting WX, I was on the big island at a wedding and brought my roadie with me to see if it would work. As much as I love a Hawaiian Mele, I can't live too long without my bluegrass music!

 

[txaviator]

The Scams....

Well, they **** me off to no end. Get this....I went to buy a can of Copenhagen (about $5.00) about a year ago. I used my Visa card which debits my checking account. My card was declined for the $5.00 charge, when I knew I had an overall balance in that account of about $8,000. I had been working a trade show, and since magnets are a key component of ALL security alarm window and door contacts, I just figured I had ran a magnet past my money clip at some point and waxed my magnetic strip.

I get home and have 3-messages from my bank. I called them and they asked "Did you buy $7,000 worth of hi-fi equipment in London this morning at 4:00 am"? Of course I didn't. My bank said they put that charge through, but when two subsequent charges came in for other items, their software looked at my spending trends and declined the other charges. Therefore, the bank shut down my card. I asked the Visa people how someone got my number, and the answer was astonishing. I was told that parts can be bought from eBay which allows a person to build a tiny 'credit card reader' for about $5.00. A dishonest waiter (or whatever) could swipe my info in a second and then give me my bill. Afterwards, my info is collected and used in a fraudulant manner. However, upon further investigation of my account, there were charges of ONE PENNY which hit my account each day, for five previous days. There was then a charge for $1.00. What ended up happening was some crook had a software program which generates random credit card numbers until they get a 'hit' / approval. After all, who would miss a few cents, not to mention the fact that the account isn't balanced until the end of each month.

I then asked a simple question: "contact the vendor and retrieve information on the people that bought the hi-fi equipment!" The lady just laughed and told me there is so much fraud happening, that there is literally no way they could afford the time to track this stuff down. Visa simply writes it off to bad debt.

The good news is that I signed a simple affidavit and faxed it in to Visa. Within 48-hours, my money was back into my account. I had to cancel my card and get a new one/number (which was a pain since I auto-pay a ton of bills with my card each month), but it all worked out in the end.

In summary, just watch your account very closely! The things these scam artists do- is simply outrageous to me. Be very careful!

Sorry for the novel.......

 

[rv8ch]

... My card was declined for the $5.00 charge, when I knew I had an overall balance in that account of about $8,000. ...I called them and they asked "Did you buy $7,000 worth of hi-fi equipment in London this morning at 4:00 am"? ....

The amount they charged was not a coincidence. I was horrified once when I used my CC to pay for wireless internet access with T-Mobile once at a Starbuck's when I was travelling. The receipt that they sent me electronically was just a raw dump of what they received from the CC company approving the transaction. It didn't have just an "OK, this guy's got at least 7 dollars left on his CC balance - approved", nor did it say "...he's got 7 dollars of his 1500 CC limit left..." No, it went all the way, and told them how much I had left in the bank account I use for direct debit to pay my CC bill! This was not a "debit" card, but a regular CC - I had just chosen to pay the bill "automagically" via my bank account. Yikes. I changed that situation fast.

 

[briand]

I then asked a simple question: "contact the vendor and retrieve information on the people that bought the hi-fi equipment!" The lady just laughed and told me there is so much fraud happening, that there is literally no way they could afford the time to track this stuff down. **** simply writes it off to bad debt.
Sorry for the novel.......

This is wrong. If no one ever has to pay the consequences for their crimes, whats to deter the thieves? Morals? You could argue then; that the credit card companies deserve to get scammed but the problem is the costs just get passed on to us. I say the CC companies need to start a co-op trust fund and use the money to hire ex special forces to track these crooks down and hand them over to the same countries/people that we hand the terrorists over to for "questioning" and let them have their way with them. I believe this crime is a form of terrorism because it has many honest people living in fear of this stuff happening to them even though it likely never will.

 

[rv8ch]

Chargebacks

I then asked a simple question: "contact the vendor and retrieve information on the people that bought the hi-fi equipment!" The lady just laughed and told me there is so much fraud happening, that there is literally no way they could afford the time to track this stuff down.

I say the CC companies need to start a co-op trust fund and use the money to hire ex special forces to track these crooks down and hand them over to the same countries/people that we hand the terrorists over to for "questioning" and let them have their way with them.

No need for special forces - the CC companies have something much more powerful - the chargeback. If an electronics company sells a stereo for $7000 and it turns out the CC was stolen, then the CC company can issue a chargeback to the stereo shop. There are conditions, of course, but the CC companies have a lot of power to deal with these situations.

In the US, the FBI is supposed to investigate CC fraud, but it's got to be a pretty spectacular amount for them to do so.

The CC companies don't really seem to be very worried about it, since they've done almost nothing to increase security, with the exception of the CVV2, and that's totally lame. There are lots of steps they could take to increase security that would not greatly increase the hassle factor, but they choose not to do so since it would cost more than the fraud costs them.