chris's blog

Buying Refurbished consoles, such as Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, and Playstation 3 is relatively common. Though they are indeed second hand and most likely recently repaired, they are still cheaper. You may be able to save somewhere between $100 - $150. Not a bad bargain especially if you’re like me, who dresses like a hobo and tries to buy everything on the cheap.

ScamChecker is a site I've been working on to help people recognise scam websites, at present specifically those that are trying to sell goods that don't exist or selling fakes.

I deal a lot in my day with websites and/or people that are dealing with fake goods. It's through these fake goods too that people are being scammed over and over, either by not receiving any items ordered or by thinking they were actually going to receive the genuine article.

So I do get a sense of perverse pleasure in reading things like this.

In June 2007 the New Bankers Association presented a new Code of Practice that tried to shift liability to consumers. I cannot really express it any other way other than to say it was a piece of crap.

Here in New Zealand we don't like to use eBay, the most popular auction website is instead TradeMe. And unfortunately things like this are happening far too often.

As part of the ScamChecker website I have been building, I wanted to convey the sense of scamminess of a website through using images of common stereotypes.

We have posted a new version of SiteHound for Firefox 3 which is due for official launch on the 17th of June.

Unfortunately we have not yet managed to solve one bug impacting Firefox 3 on Windows Vista, but we are working on that, and hope to have it resolved soon.

You do not need to uninstall SiteHound first, and so you can install the new version over the old.

Edited for Firefox 3.0.1

The last few months of my life has been deeply involved in maintaining a list and replying to questions about websites that are selling counterfeit goods, or taking orders for goods and not sending any items.

See this post for more information on that

To start things off, we need to make this very clear. Firetrust Limited, producers of awesome software MailWasher, do not and have never owned these domain names.

Cleanliness is next to godliness, which is next to your cell mate Bubba who fancies a good time.

For a long time people have been scammed by websites selling goods that don't exist, and the problem is so large it's staggering. Counterfeit goods are the greatest bait, and whether people think the goods are the real deal or not, it's the price that sucks in the victims. We aren't talking a fistful of dollars here either, we are talking scams operating in the millions.