ScamBusters New Zealand

Hi Julie and welcome to ScamBusters. Unfortunately TradeMe often turn a blind eye to unscrupulous sellers, especially when they're making money from the trades. Autographs are notoriously easy to forge and there's quite an industry based around this particular form of trading. Of course there's also...

The Register has an excellent review of Windows 10. The writer bemoans Microsoft's insistence on reporting everything you do back to base and the lack of control users have with the default setup. Here's his summary. It's good enough to use if you have to. It's definitely a step up from Windows 8. B...

It's been a while since we've seen someone using TradeMe to promote affiliate sites, but here's one fresh out of the box. Either bid 50c to make contact or he gives you the URL, right there on TM. step by step online business kit full training program to help you enter the endless world of online ma...

Shanghai Pengxin's bid for Lochinver Station has been rejected by the government on the grounds that it brought no benefit to NZ. I'm sure the huge public outcry over the sale had nothing to do with the decision.

It didn't take NZ Post long to reneg on their promise that rural delivery services wouldn't be affected by their cutbacks. The ODT reports that NZ Post is pulling out of six-day rural delivery in parts of Otago and Southland from November. We'll be getting a five day per week service and I imagine m...

Is this the first reported Postanote scam ? It involves an elderly couple from Whangaparaoa paying $24,900 to scammers for a non-existent campervan -- it's a sad story. We understand that all sales sites attract scammers these days, which is why we recommend blocking IP ranges for anyone out of New ...

Hey John... welcome to ScamBusters. The sheer number of fake cards being sold on TradeMe these days is mind-boggling. TM don't seem interested in policing their own listings and prefer to let people like us report fake cards. The best testing software is h2testw though there may be other utilities I...

TM are about to bring in "customised advertising" -- ads which are targetted at tailored to the individual. So if you've been searching for butt plugs (for example) you'll see lots of lovely ads for similar items, depending on how well TM have profiled you. The mind boggles! This "feature" kicks off...

Google has reached a deal with Adobe designed to restrict excessive Flash usage on the Chrome browser. From 1st September "good" Flash content such as video players will be allowed to automatically run, while "non-essential" Flash content -- read: advertisements -- will be automatically paused. http...

The Ashley Madison scandal continues to deliver. With some serious researchers analysing the data dumps, the whole basis of the site seems less grounded in extra-marital affairs and more like a very large scale fraud. writing in Gizmodo, Annalee Newitz found interesting data in user IP addresses. Th...

A suspected Russian government hacking team is exploiting a previously unknown Java vunerablity using the domain "electronicfrontierfoundation.org" in phishing emails. The genuine Electronic Frontier Foundation address is eff.org Oracle has now patched the exploit but if you haven't updated your Jav...

Luigi Wewege believes that the interest.co.nz article (linked in the post above) contains "extremely derogatory statements" and should not have influenced the Financial Markets Authority decision when it stripped Vivier & Co's registration as a financial services provider. The story linked Vivier to...

The Ashley Madison hack just got worse for some 37 million users. A 10-gigabyte file purportedly containing e-mails, member profiles, credit-card transactions and other sensitive Ashley Madison information became available as a BitTorrent download in the past few hours. The service promised its memb...

Are you getting annoying by Microsoft's endless nagging about upgrading to Win10? The culprit is update KB3035583 and here's how to stop it. Warning: there's some registry editing involved so if you're not comfortable tinkering under the bonnet, it's best to look away now. A great how to: http://www...

While Lenovo isn't a big name in NZ computing, there are currently 14 Lenovo listings on TM. Ars Technica warns that Lenovo have installed "crapware"which overwrites system files, replacing them with their own insecure versions which perform performance "optimisations" and clean "system junk files" ...