December 28, 2007 at 12:20 pm Post Author: Giania Tags: bad guys, credit card, fraud, pirate bay, rip off report, rknet, search, WoW ·
First and foremost, sorry for the lengthy, unannounced break. This time of year has its way of ruining time management, and my co-authors can rarely be encouraged to slide their slug-like countenances from the couches of whatever den of iniquity they’ve parked themselves in. Or they’re too busy having a dance off. Six of one, half dozen of the other.
Anyway, onto the really important part.
If you are here because someone called “rknet” has charged your card, it was not, and could not, be me. What little research I’ve done about who it could be has pulled up three possibilities for anybody who has been charged by “rknet”:
- You have been keylogged.
- You have been ripped off by a false computer help site.
- There is apparently some other RKnet which is related to some kind of tracking, might be related. (See the comment thread.)
I’m sorry to hear that anyone has been inappropriately charged. I myself am still in the middle of trying to get a chargeback resolved on two charges I didn’t authorize. I wish any and all of you luck in getting your money back.
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November 15, 2007 at 12:33 pm Post Author: Giania Tags: fraud, gmail, google, Help the Author, pay per click, search, seo, wtf ·
Today while studiously going through the process of marking all the newsletters I don’t bother with as read, I happened to note the following “Web Clip” above my inbox.
Sort of scant information for someone who paid for an ad. I daresay it looks just like spam. Junk. Fraudulent and whatnot.
I braced myself and made the decision to investigate. I expected lots of “buy _________” etc (item names not included, I get enough spammer attention). Yet here’s what I got:
What in the world is this nonsense? How did it end up as a legitimate paid ad in Gmail’s web clips? I’m starting to feel bad that I hit the submit button as many times as I did, since I’m beginning to suspect that this is some kind of elaborate click fraud. The mindset I can picture at work here is “Hi visitor, we paid 50 cents to get you here, now click the submit button because you know how curious you are to find out what happens. That information in the boxes above? Oh nothing… Just what we plan to charge our client for PPC. But hey, we’ve got this neat button. Isn’t it great? Hit it again!”
Any geniuses out there who could confirm or refute this assumption?
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