Nigerian 419 scam evolves, migrates to Senegal

I received an odd email today from someone I didn't know. The email was purportedly from a young lady (of course) so I quickly googled to see if I could find any further information, and came across a snippet on a business contact site where this young lady claimed to be a refugee living in a camp in Dakar. My interest was piqued.

I replied cautiously, not revealing any personal information and asking for more from "her". This is the reply I got:

Subject: I NEED TO KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT YOU

Message: Dearest love,
I am really happy in your response to my mail.How is everything?Hope you are fine.
Mine is a bit tough over here in Dakar Senegal.You are admired.
My name is Charity Zarki from Ivory Coast in West Africa,5.3ft tall, fair in complexion,(never married before )and presently i am 23 years old residing in the refugee camp here in Dakar as a result of the civil war that was fought in my country.
My Late Father Dr.Richard Zarki was the managing director of Mavococoa and Associates (Ltd) and he was the personal advicer to the former head of state (late Dr Aliyu Lim) before the rebels attacked our house one early morning and killed my mother and my father in cold blood. It was only me that is alive
now and I managed to make my way to a near by country Senegal where i am leaving now in a refugee camp.
I would like to know more about you.Your likes and dislikes, your hobbies and what you are doing presently.I will tell you more about myself in my next mail.Attached here are my pictures befor the civil war erupted. I will also like to see more of your pictures.I will tell you more in my next mail.
Hoping to hear from you soonest.
Thanks.

Attached were two photos. The second was of an attractive young black woman, but the first was a strange still life (see picture).

Reading the email, alarm bells started going off as soon as I read the words "my late father". Anyone who has received a classic 419 email (named after the Nigerian law code under which these criminals are prosecuted) will recognise the pattern:

- I come from a poor African country
- my late father/uncle/cousin was a top general/politician/scientist working for a big bank/multinational/charity
- before he died he came across a huge sum of money that I would now like to get out of the country
- I need your help to do this, and in return I'll give you a percentage.

It seems the 419 has evolved. Instead of baiting you with the money, the scammers are now baiting you with a personal appeal - a pretty young girl whose life has been ruined by an appalling war in Senegal (further research reveals that Senegal is actually one of the most peaceful African countries!). Once you reply, the line is reeled in slowly and eventually the money story is revealed.

The interesting thing I found in this incident is the picture of the flowers. This image of bling - chocolates, gold, perfume - is so irrelevant to the message, but so crude in its intent. Like most scams in life, it's targeted at the poor and desperate.

Now, I can't wait to see what someone with more time on their hands will do with these scammers. They are often just as gullible and greedy as the people they are targeting, and can be made to do the funniest things - see www.419eater.com for some hilarious examples of scambaiting.

Aion takes wing

Last weekend saw the launch of Aion, a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) created by Korean developer NCSoft. It's been hyped, of course, and called the first true competitor to the 800lb gorilla of the gaming world, World of Warcraft (WoW). We're not sure about world records for games, but Aion's makers are claiming it's had 400,000 pre-order sales, beating any other game released this year. Whether it will ever reach WoW's 11m+ subscribers is another thing.

I found out about Aion quite late on, and only joined the beta program in time for the 5th, and penultimate, closed beta event. Complex games such as Aion require a lot of homework, especially if you join a hardcore guild that expects the best from you. In my research, which involved hours of trawling through forums and blogs looking for technical info and tips, I've noticed a lot of ex-Warcraft players, so there may be some truth in rumours of WoW's fall in popularity. It's been going since 2004, after all, and despite recent news of a new update, many gamers feel it's time to move on.

As launches go, Aion's was remarkably stable. The servers were expected up at 8pm on Sunday night, and were only about five minutes late. Those who didn't get in on their first attempt however found themselves in a queue. After a few minutes wait, I noticed the queue suddenly shrinking, probably due to more spaces being opened up on the server. However, those who were even a few minutes behind me ended up sitting in the queue for up to four hours.

Those who had got in first had a huge advantage. The first stages of the game are entirely linear, and early quests involved collecting, say, five items that "spawn", or appear, in a certain location. There were three or four people standing around each spawn location, madly clicking the spot where the item would spawn next in the hope of getting it first.

With such a limited set of resources to complete the first quests, the early birds managed to rush ahead of the crowd and extend their lead. Even with ten channels (separate game worlds with identical content) available, the crowds were unbelievable. Many of us skipped early quests just to get ahead of the crowd.

Those of us lucky enough to get into the game were rewarded with a very stable game, and I didn't crash once in the first few hours I played. Network lag was low as well, even with hundreds of people in the same area.

Another aspect of the launch that impressed me was the server and race distribution. Warhammer Online, which we reviewed favourably at launch, went downhill quickly because of population imbalances between the two factions and between servers. NCSoft seems to have enforced strict caps on server and race populations, so end-game player-versus-player (PvP) should be much more balanced.

The only problem NCSoft faces is how to reduce the queues. The game features a personal shop system (see image), whereby you can set up a shop and then leave the game running for hours (as long as you have items for sale - but it's easy enough to offer a useless item and set the price absurdly high, so no-one will buy it). Many players have been complaining that players are setting up a shop rather than logging out, leaving no room for players in the queue.

In Korea and China, where the game has been out for over a year, players have to pay by the hour to play, so leaving your character logged in is not an option for most. The general consensus is that this is a feature that hasn't translated well to the West, and we're hoping that NCSoft will at least set a cap on the time you can leave your shop running.

I don't want to 'Think Different'

Apple's 'Think Different' campaign was largely heralded as saving the company's fortunes. The company's decision to follow its slogan has largely been successful: the iPod is leagues ahead of other MP3 players in terms of use, while the iPhone is the fastest and easiest-to-use touchscreen phone, which showed the world how multi-touch gestures could really be used.

The question is, does Apple really need to 'Think Different' everywhere? I recently had the misfortune to have to go to the Apple Store in London. In my defence, I didn't want to, but HMV didn't have the iPod Touch that I wanted and I didn't have time to order online.

If you haven't been in an Apple Store before it's like walking into a living Ikea catalogue. Rather than shelves full of products that you can pick up and buy - some would say this 'feature' is a hallmark of what makes a shop a shop - there are cafe-style tables with Apple products on them.

Apple's philosophy is that rather than simply buying something, you should sit down at a table and have a nice chat with the finely-manicured store employees about which of Apple's three products (Mac, iPod or iPhone) you'd like to buy.

It might sound like a comforting idea, but the fact is that the majority of people shopping in the store seem to be total idiots that need to talk to an Apple person for a couple of hours. This leaves nobody to tell you that if you know what you want, you have to queue up at the front desk where all of the stock is kept (although you don't know if what you want is in stock until you reach the till).

In essence, then, 'Think Different' in Apple Store terms is a bit like a crap Argos without the stock-checking computers. It's not helped by the fact that the queue is populated by the same idiots that have just had a very long and comforting chat slowing you down.

Take for example the man that I was stood behind, whose conversation at the till went something like this.

"I'd like to buy an iMac," says the man.

"Which would you like?" replies the Apple man.

"The metal one," says the man.

"Like these ones," says the Apple man pointing at the iMacs that they use for tills.

"No," says the man, "I'd like the metal fold up one."

The Apple man looks a bit confused, and then it slowly dawns on him: "Do you mean the Macbook?"

Looks as though Apple's customers also 'Think Different'.

Software that thinks for you

I started off writing this column to share a tip about how to stop Word (in this case, the 2003 version) from changing URLs in your documents into hyperlinks. If this is something that's annoyed you in the past, you may already have found the solution, but there's no harm in sharing it again, and it'll help me remember it for next time. But as I started writing, I noticed how my spell-checker was underlining plural words ("URLs") and offering "URL" as a replacement. If it has the singular word in the dictionary, why can't it recognise the plural?

Let me share that tip before I notice something else and explode in an apoplexy of rage: go to Tools, then choose "AutoCorrect Options". I initially looked under "Options" as I didn't think turning a URL into a link was a correction, but that's Word for you. In "AutoCorrect Options" click on the tab marked "AutoFormat As You Type" and in the section "Replace as you type" uncheck the option "Internet and network paths with hyperlinks."

OK, now that's out of the way, what is it with all the hand-holding? Surely the solution to poor spelling is not software that guesses the correct spelling for you (often with hilarious or even litigious results) but education? - if not a good schooling, then at least the ability to use online dictionaries. Oh, well Word "conveniently" pops up the Online Research "action pane" for me when I accidentally click while holding the Alt key. Grrr! I know where dictionary.com is! Get orf my screen!

I'll admit that the spell-checker has spared my blushes a few times, but I can't help getting the impression it's letting me make more mistakes than I used to. I tried letting it correct me automatically once, but when I realised that I was happily typing the same misspellings again and again, I turned it off. It doesn't correct you, it teaches you that it's OK to make mistakes. Whether you're a writer or not, it's a good habit to read through what you've written, not simply to check for red underlinings.

The Art of Bile, Hate and Stupidity

Not too long ago, I posted about the kind of fluffy, heartwarming sites that just might help you believe that the world isn't almost entirely populated by dribbling imbeciles. Unfortuantely, that's just an illusion. The world in general and the internet in particular are suppurating pools of fatuous idiocy and I can prove it. Fortunately, if you're as full of bile, hate and stupidity as the rest of us, you'll probably get a laugh out of the evidence.

(The Customer Is) Not Always Right
Working in customer service is, by and large, made of unremitting suckage. I never managed to survive long in customer-facing roles. (Why do you think I'm happier lurking behind the written word and occasionally sniping around the corner?) Fortunately for the poor souls who work in the service industries that hold the tatters of our economy together, Not Always Right provides an anonymous location to vent about the worst (and funniest) attrocities on the front lines of consumer culture.

Passive-Aggressive Notes
If Not Always Right celebrates the awfulness of having to serve your fellow human beings, Passive-Aggresive Notes demonstrates that it's bad enough just having to live alongside them. From Facebook drama to snippy notes from roommates, colleagues and complete strangers, PAN immortalises the bad spelling, godawful clip-art and unreasonable demands in all their irrational glory.


Passive-Aggressive Notes: anthropomorphic fridges are only the beginning

Photoshop Disasters
It's safe to say that virtually every published commercial image in the world has undergone a certain degree of Photoshopping. It's bad enough when it's used to create impossible visions of male/female/can't-tell-due-to-excessive-Photoshopping beauty, but sometimes the results are just deformed. You'll find those here.

Photoshop Disasters: I'm pretty sure her midriff shouldn't be doing that...

FMyLife
Real life stories of day-to-day abrasion as the universe grinds you down. At times it's wince-inducingly funny in a self-depreciating sort of way, if you manage to miss the angst-ridden teens.

spEak You're bRanes
Reading the BBC's Have Your Say pages has a sort of car-crash fascination for me. Just when I think I might have found a redeeming quality in my species, I give myself a quick cure by visiting HYS and innoculating myself with the barely-moderated rantings of bigots, racists, BNP supporters and other users with even less of a grip on reality. Or grammar. You don't even have to troll to get a rise out of them - they do it all by themselves. spEak You're bRanes is one of several sites that exists purely to laugh at the HYS denizens. It's probably also the funniest. Comments are currently subject to heavy moderation via the Blah filter and have decamped to the Blah Your Branes forum.

So go on. Hate a bit. It's almost certain to be good for you. Or cause cancer. One or the other.

Size Zero electronics

Attending the IFA consumer electronics conference in Berlin for the first time can be a tiring experience. Several aircraft hanger-sized halls are filled to the rafters with some of the latest computers, TVs, speaker systems and other consumer electronics as well as a motley collection of household appliances too. If, after two days of trekking from one end of the titanic sized venue to the other, you’re not left begging for a quiet, darkened room filled with soft furnishings in which to recover then you’re made of sturdier stuff than the rest of us.

One of the budding trends we’ve noticed at this year’s IFA is the ever increasing thinness of various products, most notably laptops and TVs. Intel’s new range of ultra low voltage processors has led to a small flood of slim and slender ultra portable laptops from several manufacturers.

Although we’re big fans of ultra portable laptops here at Shopper, we strongly suspect that many of these ultra low voltage laptops, as well as other lightweight computers such as netbooks, will never venture outside of their owner’s homes. Their thin and lightweight frames will therefore be of no use other than to elicit pigeon-like cooing noises from their owner’s needlessly-envious friends.

Meanwhile Samsung and LG were showing off several prototype TVs which are incredibly thin, no more than a few millimetres thick at most, due to their LED and AMOLED backlighting. Although these TVs are supposed to use less power and have better image quality than existing models they would currently cost so much money that an LG spokesperson freely admitted that their main purpose was to look lovely whether they were turned on or off.

A Philips spokesperson sniffily dismissed Samsung’s and LG’s superthin TVs as being too fragile. He speculated that their thin designs placed extra unwanted stress on the glass panels covering the front of the TV, although we have no idea if this is a valid criticism or a case of sour grapes.

Although I’m as fond of super thin, pretty models as the next person I do wonder if our waist lines and our credit ratings would be better off if we stopped buying and starting at super thin gadgets and got out a bit more instead. That delirious idea must be the trade show fatigue talking so I’m off to stroke my MacBook Air and have a lie down.

Alan Lu

The sound of CAPTCHA

Google seems to be on a mission to deliberately alienate its users with its ludicrously hard CAPTCHA system. The idea is that you type in the hard-to-see words to prove that you're a human, rather than some kind of evil spamming robot sent to create billions of free accounts.

Fair enough, we all hate spammers. Only, spammers are rarely cleverly-programmed robots designed to automatically create free accounts. Usually, they're a room full of people in a third-world country hired by the real spammer to create thousands of fake accounts by manually typing in the correct answer to the CAPTCHA.

Google seems to have cottoned on to this with its nigh-on-impossible-to-read CAPTCHA system, which does an incredibly good job of keeping robots and normal people out of its systems. To finish things off, you'd best not have a visual impairment.

You see, Google's also implemented a kind of audio capture, so those people that can't see the screen properly can have a series of numbers read out that they then type in. Seems simple enough, but that would be too easy and you never know when there's a voice-to-text spamming robot around (speech recognition in Google's world must be a million miles better than in the real world).

So, to make this audio CAPTCHA immune to this kind of attack, the track has been obscured. By obscured, I mean that some sadistic mumbling robot that appears to be phoning in the CAPTCHA test from an incredibly loud party full of other sadistic mumbling robots, mechanically blurts out some unintelligible numbers (well, I assume they're numbers although sounds would be more accurate).

Once it's done, a strange Mexican-sounding man says "one second" or "once again" or something like that. Then the whole process starts again. Surely there's got to be a better way.

And the Guinness World Record for critical acclaim goes to ...

Today, I was lucky enough to receive a review copy of the new Batman game (now available for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, with PC to follow soon). It's undoubtedly excellent, and anyone keen on Batman – or on action games with fisticuffs, gadgets, stealth and high production values – should rush out and buy a copy.

In fact, the excellence of this game was brought to my attention some days ago by no one less than the Guinness Book of Records. It had been awarded the world record for 'Most Critically Acclaimed Superhero Game Ever' – an announcement which generated no little amusement, confusion and even outrage in the Shopper office.

I think of the Guinness Book of Records primarily through its TV incarnation of Record Breakers. From that I though that records should be measurable, such as the fastest man, tallest mammal or longest period spent sat in a bath of baked beans. These are facts, as far as the limits of human knowledge understand them. Such records are also informative, interesting and entertaining. As are the lengths that some, possibly slightly eccentric, individuals would go to break records and get their name in the book.

I'm not saying that video games don't belong in the Guinness Book of Records. High scores for classic arcade titles are a good example of why Guinness have taken a strong interest in games in recent years – as evidenced by the Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition, see http://gamers.guinnessworldrecords.com.

However, I can't accept the use of review scores as some kind of tangible fact. Reviews are the opinions of individuals or the combined opinions of those working for a publication like Shopper, they are not facts and so shouldn't be used for the basis of a world record. The actual scores are factual, but fairly meaningless without the reviewer's thoughts to support them. For example, just because a product wins a Best Buy award in Shopper doesn't mean its ideal for everyone, it might not be suitable for your needs, or in this case it might be too violent, too difficult, or you may just dislike Batman (though you'd be wrong on this last count).

Guinness has decided upon this record because Batman: Arkham Asylum has the highest score for a superhero-related game on review aggregation site MetaCritic, www.metacritic.com. Metacritic, and other aggregators, like film site Rotten Tomatoes, take a selection of review scores from around the web and average them together using a variety to methods to give one overall score. It's a useful way to get some idea of critical opinion at a glance, but the number generated is a very rough guide to quality, and doesn't belong in the Guinness book of records anymore than my personal choice of favourite film does.

It's also worth pointing out that the 'record' was awarded on the day the game was released, when many reviews still weren't out. Metacritic's ratings don't include every review either, making the whole process even more subjective. Finally, its closest rival in the category of superhero critical acclaim, the excellent Spider-Man 2 on the PlayStation 2, isn't even listed on Metacritic as it's too old.

The whole thing is one of the most cynical marketing stunts I've seen for some time, designed to benefit both Eidos and Guinness, but meaning very little in the whole scale of things, and only really succeeding in putting a black mark on Guinness's own record book.