Hoax Killer

Get ripped in 4 weeks

hoaxkiller — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 03:45:14 +0000

I have seen an advert that you can get ripped (build your mussels) in 4 weeks without doing much exercises. This is yet another product scam.

How to detect
If you see a product advert single page website with lot of comments, there is a 99% chance that it is a product scam. All these websites looks like created by someone who has already used that product and has good results. And you will see many “user comments” of users that have already used this product with success. And most of the time the original site creator will claim that he lives in your area (automatically generated city / country name by reverse look up of your IP address). If you try to put your own comment, you will realize that adding new comments section on those sites doesn’t work at all.

What to do
Close that web page

What do they gain
Most of the time they will offer a special free trial where you have to pay a small amount as shipping cost. And sometimes they will charge you additional amount without you knowing (this is done by adding a clause to their “terms and conditions” which says you are agreeing to pay $100 per month to that site as a subscription fee and it will automatically deduct from your credit card until you manually cancel the subscription) since we just check the “I agree to terms” check box without looking at the terms most of the time.

Real scam
“Shipping charges” you will be paying as well as in most cases the subscription fee.

Evony is a Scam?

hoaxkiller — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 03:44:50 +0000

Evony is a MMORPG game. What is misleading in this advert is there is no Queen in this game to save. The game play gives the idea that this is an age of empires clone.

This advert says “Play secretively”, yet if you play Evony, it will clearly show on the network logs (one of my friend got in to trouble because of playing Evony during working hours). And of course there are no “boobs” in the game.

And all of these adverts promote that it’s free. The basic game is free; but to get promoted in the game you need to buy game coins using real cash.

If you suck at it, you need to spend money for resources, truce agreements. If you are good at it, still you need to spend money for things like city teleporters, medals.

And if you don’t play everyday, your army will die due to starving or you will get owned by an active player (you may loose your cities and your in game reputation). So in a nutshell, evony is a waste of time and money.

P.S:

This part is added later due to some peoples claims about me being a noob, who got owned in game. So following is my in game details. And I never paid a penny, not even the frigging $5 package.

I started playing Evony in W16. I was the VH of the #1 alliance in S42 which is called JA-Elite and then became the VH of DARKSIDE which is the current number 1 alliance. And my move between alliances was a purely political. If you look at that server, there is a huge battle going on between JA allies (JA-Elite, JA-LGD, JA-MSA, DARKSIDE) and another super alliance (B.A.M.F., Pyramid, Korn Etc). My nickname there was LankanLion.

After a while I moved to S64 and joined an alliance called PSB and became a VH there. We had only 30 members and we dominated the whole server. It only took 5-6 of our members to bring down a whole alliance. Lot of alliances got disbanded because of us, we got bored, some of us moved to new servers and I quit. My nickname there was LL (shorter version for LankanLion). Oh by the way couple of super alliances (super alliance: group of alliances working together) tried to bring us down and most of them got owned and quit.

Nigerian scams

hoaxkiller — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 02:51:07 +0000

How to detect
You will get an email from some unknown person in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, the Congo, the Ivory Coast, South Africa, Mauritius, Philippines or Azerbaijan (or any other country) saying that they need your help to move a “huge amount of money” out of their country. Email will show the amount of the money and the percentage you will get for helping them.

What to do
Delete that email.

What do they gain
Either via email, fax or telephone they will try to build a relationship with you and ultimately they want you to send a processing / security / administration fee for the transaction.

Real Scam
They are after the “Processing / Security Fee”. If you deposit the money, the money is gone as well as the person who contacted you.

Lottery Scams

hoaxkiller — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 02:34:25 +0000

How to detect
You will be notified via an email that you have won a price / lottery from a competition you have never participated at the first place. The email will be addressed to your first name, to convince you that it’s legitimate, but you should understand that it has been auto generated email which has been sent to thousands.

What to do
Just ignore that email. There is no point of even adding that email address to the spam filter because they use random generated email addresses for these bulk email sending.

What do they gain
Without knowing this is a scam (or just being curious to see what happens next) if you proceed with contacting them, they will ask you to pay a “small administration fee” for documentation and administration.

Real Scam
There is no prize and all they after is the “administration fee” which may be $5 to $1000. As soon as they collect your money, you will not hear from them again.