Life as I find it

MTNL Triband is cheap, easy to set up, and reasonably reliable when all you do is surf. When you end up downloading a lot of data, you find that there is much to discover on the front of getting what you pay for. I just tested the regular speed I get on my modem, and it turned out to be 100kbps. No wonder my MTNL connection always seemed slow. And no, it wasn’t any slower than usual when I tested. Was running normally for it.

Now, the thing is, I have never paid for a slow connection as such. One of the main reasons for signing up for Triband was MTNL’s clear statement that cable internet providers provide speeds less than 256kbps, and speeds under 256kbps don’t qualify as broadband.

SO I signed up for 512kbps, and when it still seemed slow, upgraded to 1mbps Still, no change in performance. At which point, I tested the speeds I was actually getting. My modem shows 256kbps, while any online test shows around 100 +/- 5. So where is all this money I’ve paid MTNL for 4 years gone?

Apparently, I’m not the only one. Almost every person, regardless of what plan they choose seems to begin from slow speeds and it takes complaints about slow speeds to get them to raise your limits to what you paid for. Out of 17 people I spoke with, only 3 began their internet connections with the speeds they paid for. 4 of them complained about slow speeds a couple of times, and it was increased. 1 has a recurring problem with speed on a connection that should give him 512kbps. He complains, it goes up, and is slow again after some days. 6 others with the 512kbps night unlimited plan had never checked the speeds they got since they mostly used them for surfing and downloading when they were sleeping, but on my insistence checked and were angry to discover that they were not even getting half the speed the plan charges them for. The others were miscellaneous cases with complicated stories of plan changes/problems and not much relevant to speed.

My husband thinks I should go to the consumer courts. However, the problem with this is that consumer courts would like you to first approach MTNL, at which point they readily increase your speed – so then you don’t really have a complaint left for the court.

What I am looking at is this default “setting” that cheats people on a regular basis till they complain. If their billing system can refer to their records of my plan and bill according to that, why can’t their speed system refer to the same plan and provide according to that?

In MTNL’s own words, they are not providing a broadband service, since their speeds are not exceeding 256kbps.

Oh, they have the capacity – I’ve seen lightening fast MTNL connections. Incredible speeds, and real value for money. The thing is, you have to not just pay for it, but make sure that you test the speed you get and insist that they give you what you paid for.

What would be the electricity bill for the additional usage of the computer when my downloads took over 5 times the time they should for over 3 years? Who compensates me for this? Maybe we need a PIL.

In a world where online services abound and flourish under the comparitive anonymity the net offers, fraudulent service providers have a whole new market to themselves. Being too trusting is a bad idea.

I had been meaning to submit my site to online directories for a long time, as many people said its good to be listed, and links and all that.

Some surfing brought me to Submit Edge, which offers submissions to 750 high PR directories for 60$. The site really looks like these guys know what they are doing, and have an understanding of Search Engine Optimization, Link Building, etc. Kush Infosys Pvt.Ltd. which runs the site and service are based in Mumbai, so I thought that I’d be giving business to someone from our town. Sounded good, so I paid them, filled in their form with the link I wanted submitted and careful descriptions.

Done, right? Wrong!

Once I received acknowledgement of my payment, there was complete silence on their end.

As you see, the submissions should have been done in two weeks. As the duration came to a close, I started wondering what happened of the services I had booked, and wrote them an email. I got a response saying that it will happen soon.

Finally, about 3-4 days after their stated time was up, I got my “submission report”. Imagine my horror to see:

1. The main page of the first site I was submitted to (PR7) had links to adult sites!!! Checking a couple of days later, the entire directory was gone and replaced by some video site in some language I don’t understand.
2. The second site in the list doesn’t have a category for where they claimed they submitted by link to.
3. The third site has a domain name with random letters, and is listed as a PR6 site, when in reality it has no PR at all.
4. In fact, many of the sites had random letter domain names.
5. Their High PR list has exactly 21 directories that state a PR of 5 and above. Please note that these also aren’t really all actually High PR, as the third point shows.
6. From there on, it is PR4 and PR3 till 41 and goes downhill from there.
7. Not a single incoming link from these sites points to the link that was submitted (which I guess is a good thing, though it defeats the entire purpose of the exercise)

Aghast at what I had paid for, what I was getting, and what it could potentially mean to my site, I emailed them with my findings to receive no response at all. I tried calling them, but kept getting through to an automated mailbox.

I filed a dispute under PayPal, upon which I got a response within hours from them offering to replace links with problems or provide new links.

Not desiring new links of this kind, I asked for a refund, and escalated my claim out of an unnecessarily overdeveloped sense of responsibility so that PayPal could see what their services were being used for, and other buyers could be protected. Turns out, PayPal wasn’t particularly interested if their sellers use their services to cheat people, as long as there are no goods involved. What is more, they did no investigation of any kind, but automatically shut down my claim because:

As stated in our User
Agreement, the claims process only applies to the shipment of goods. It
does not apply to complaints about the attributes or quality of goods
received. Therefore, we are unable to reverse this transaction or issue a
refund.

This is mentioned in the PayPal policy as intangibles not being eligible for consumer protection.

However, the payment in my account allowed me to create a dispute, even though there was no shipping address provided, and I clearly mentioned “services” as the transaction type and the dispute was successfully created about something PayPal had no intention of looking into, or resolving. It allowed me to escalate the dispute into a claim, upon which it was automatically closed.

This is clearly a strange and problematic service from PayPal that unscrupulous providers can exploit to their advantage, because it gives the illusion that the dispute will be investigated, when in reality what happens is that it gets discarded and finalized as closed. No investigation happens, and while justice is implied, it actually removes all options a claimant has in the system. Thus, even when the seller might have initiated some kind of compensation, he is actually released and essentially set scot-free to lather, rinse, repeat with some other gullible consumer.

Additionally, the fake service provider actually gets the credibility of having disputes against them dismissed by the “authority”.

So, to summarize:

• Don’t pay anyone for any service online, unless you trust them.
• DON’T trust PayPal’s dispute system unless you are dealing with tangible goods, regardless of what their dispute form says.
• Don’t know about other submission services, but SubmitEdge is clearly a fraud.

For whoever is interested, this is a sample report of submissions made, and if you want something like this associated with your site, go ahead:

The Horror Submissions Report from Submit Edge

I got this email from a friend.

ICICI bank’s net banking has a duplicate site as details given below. Please be careful while using ICICI net banking.
ICICI Bank Duplicate site-be careful

—–ICICI Bank Duplicate site —-

Genuine Site

Hi All,
An important piece of information.
Surprising both the sites have secured SSL from Verisign !!!!

beware !!
This is one of the worst phishing scam ever seen.
Here are the both the URLs, they are same, except there is a space (%20) at the end of the phishing URL.

The wrong one
https://infinity.icicibank.co.in/BANKAWAY?Action.RetUser.Init.001=Y&AppSignonBankId=ICI&AppType=corporate&abrdPrf=N%20
Actual ICICI Site
https://infinity.icicibank.co.in/BANKAWAY?Action.RetUser.Init.001=Y&AppSignonBankId=ICI&AppType=corporate&abrdPrf=N

Actually, that is not the thing. If you look at the images carefully, you will see that the ICICI url is icicibank.co.in while the fraud url in the image is icici-infinitysupport.com <—- Do NOT login here with your real ICICI details.

I checked out the url and it now seems to belong to an expired hosting in any case, but I bet the scam is not dead, but simply moved to a fresh url.

Beware.

I got this email:

Dear Administrator,

We inform you that your account is about to expire. It is strongly recommended to update it immediately. Update form is located here. However, failure to confirm your records may result in account suspension.

Confidential: Please be advised that the information contained in this email message, including all attached documents or files, is privileged and confidential and is intended only for the use of the individual or individuals addressed. Any other use, dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. This is the automated message. Please don’t reply. You tell me.

Talk of spam….. i don’t even know if I need to talk about this, except that it is sad that in this online world, it is so easy to defraus (or attempt to do so).

I had never heard of the company that sent me the email, forget buying something that needs updated subscriptions. Obviously a case of phishing or some get-rich-quick-illegally kind of thing.

I researched this message to see what experiences others had had and came across:

The write of this blog, some Ritesh Roshan has published it on his blog!!!

The description of this blog says:

“THIS BLOG IS CREATED TO EXPRESS THE FEELING & CURRENT RESEARCHES OF
SCIENCES. THESE EXPRESSION LEADS IN THE SPREAD OF KNOWLEDGE ABOUT
SCIENCE. THESE KNOWLEDGES HELP IN DIFERENT SCIENTIFIC DISCUSSION.
FURTHER, PRAYING FOR EVERY PERSONS WHO CLICK FOR MY PERSONAL BLOG AND
THOSE WHO DIDN’T CLICKED THIS FOR ANY REASON. YOUR’S FRIEND RITESH
ROSHAN”

Some exploration led me to:

For a moment, I thought that this was some student from Patna running a scam. Then I thought it must be some student who had been convinced to pass on a scam as a genuine message.

Then I looked at all the posts in the blog. The posts list looks like my spam box. All sex spam and scam. Yet, the description didn’t sound spammy.

Now I am wondering what happens when a spammer gers someones “email to blog” ID and runs it through a regular spam bot without the benifit of spam filters and stuff a normal email account would have.

And there are other people like this. Lazy to hunt for links at the moment, but there are plenty who create and abandon blogs and get careless with stuff like logins and blogging email IDs

For me, this post highlights two major concerns:

• What does it do to a person’s reputation if a spammer is running sex and scams in his name on his blog and what can be done to prevent it
• How are these scams still operating in a world of computerized banking and tracking of fraud?

Might be worthwhile making a preventative measures kind of post about this later.

I came across this bizarre (yeah, that’s my favourite word) situation with poor Vlad, who like many of us here is a blogger writing about his interests and writing paid posts as opportunities arise. Now, this situation seems to have a lot of angles to it, but from what I basically understand….

This Vlad accepts to write a review about ePerks. From all that I have heard, this was a positive review (I can’t find it). However, comments on his post were very strongly negative. These had some intervention attempts by an anonymous commenter and the whole thing heated up.

Well… he addressed that exploding comments situation inviting an exploration into ePerks in a follow up post. The company itself did what ….. they shouldn’t have, if they valued their reputation. They threatened him. Now, for a company that buys reviews from bloggers to build thier reputation, to threaten a blogger for writing – and from what I hear, Vlad did not criticize the company until then – is like having an axe… don’t know where to put it… look…. there’s my foot…..

This is basically what happened. This was followed by an explosion of bloggers speaking up in support of Vlad (like I am doing right now). It really is no longer the issue what the services of ePerks are anymore. The issue now is their image. For a company paying to get reviewed, it sure has more unpaid reviews now, and none of them that they would want to pay for. I doubt if any of them include a link either. Some examples would be:

• iHype & ePerks – How To Kill A Startup by Andy Beard really looks into this situation from many angles. I found this post really helpful in understanding the situation.
• Presumed Guilty Until Proven Innocent by Aaron Walls speaks briefly about the right to free speech and the risk involved in mass acquiring of links without building relationships.
• Memo to ePerks.com: You idiots! Trying to censor a real estate weblogger is a poor way to defend your reputation — such as it is… by Greg Swann along with some other posts, all equally “defending” the right to free speech.
• There are many others who have got angry about this whole thing.

My perspectives on this:

• ePerks: This was an incredibly stupid thing to do, which I guess I don’t need to tell you by now. If you pay for a review, you get a review. The end. If you don’t like the comments, go camp out on the comments form, address the commenters (which you did). However, threatening a blogger for something he did not do….. You don’t have a leg to stand on. Opinions are opinions. The smart thing would have been to acknowledge the comments, apologize if anyone had suffered inconvenience, and invite them into a dialogue to resolve the issue, or make your stand clear. This could have got you a few free nice posts, for graceful handling. Now, it is just about digging yourself deeper and deeper, and the damage is really beyond control. How many bloggers can you sue? Do they even live within your reach to do that? Really, I see no happy solution for you beyond a massive apology, an attitude shift and big payments to bloggers for damage control.
• Vlad: I see you doing what you were supposed to be doing initially, but I wonder if you really understood the imact of your second post. While it certainly invited investigation and feedback, I felt that it enouraged making extreme stands, which is good to get lots of comments, but really, how important are comments – at what price?). Though I don’t see how it would have changed anything considering the nature of comments that followed.
• Common man: I understand your frustration at being scammed and applaud your sharing of your experience so that it may serve to warn possible victims, or provide feedback to ePerks, if they do attempt a change of attitude.
• The blogging community: I expereince this rush of support for Vlad as one of the strengths of this platform, and the community. I don’t know Vlad at all, but being in his situation (having written about a scam earlier) I know that it is a risk that we get unnecessarily caught up in legal hassles. While we know that there is something inside us that wants us to stand for the truth, it is equally difficult to face legal feed regardless of who will win eventually. I don’t know most of you personally, but this act of solidarity makes me feel that there is support anyway if we stand for our beliefs.
• For me: The truth needs to be told. If I can do it in a way that facilitates resolution, superb. If not, confrontation it is!