Dear Esteemed Customers,
Due to management problems, your btconnect email will have to be verified by our customer service department due to large amount of spam complains.
Please verify your accounts by sending the following information or your accounts will be closed.

Full Names:
Login Name:
Password:
Country:

THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.
BTCONNECT CUSTOMER SERVICE

Where do I start?This is a tad more plausible than some phishing emails.  It purports to come from a sensible email address rather than some name like “Hilton.Q.Warthog” as some do, and the btconnect.com domain is indeed registered by BT Connect. It is not asking you to log into a website but to reply to this valid-looking address instead.  So why didn’t I fall for it?

• I am not a BT Connect customer – that is a dead giveaway
• Look at the post headers, or even just hit reply, and you find the REPLY-TO address is a hotmail address.  Not the preferred type of account for a big company, especially not one that is an Internet provider.
• I have more than one e-mail account and recived this several times.   I don’t have multiple accounts as an anti-phishing measure but that is a bonus feature.  Even if a totally genuine-looking email came from a company that I do have an account with there is a chance I would get a couple of copies which would show it to be a fraud.
• Whoever wrote this probably does not have English as a first language, and certainly not British English. Example “due to large amount of spam complains.”
• Don’t British companies tend to have ‘customer services’ departments and not ‘customer service’ departments?
• Anyone at all familiar with customer service attitudes in the UK would be suspicious at being addressed as ‘dear esteemed customer’

The clincher, of course, is that no company in its right mind will ever write or phone and ask for  login and password details.  I may be over-suspicious and cynical about such things, to the extent that even when I get mails from my bank that are addressed to my proper email account, use my proper name, and have valid-looking links I do not use the links – I log into the bank using my own shortcuts. Better safe than sorry.

Anyway: 4/10 for this effort.  Nice try.

If all fraud attempts were so transparent we would have nothing to worry about, but it appears that crooks are getting more clever and putting in the effort to cross over into the real world with their online antics.  Just read this story for the details.

Quite a brilliant scam.  The crooks set up a website that looks like a parking fine website where you have to download some little toolbar to see their own vehicle – but in doing so they download a trojan.  The trojan acts a bit like the Antivirus 2009 scam, throwing up virus alert messages and directing you to a site where you have to pay to get the virus removed.

To get people to login to this site there is no e-mail or dodgy link.  The address is printed on a fake parking ticket that someone goes out and puts on car windshields. It is an interesting development because it is a physical rather than a technical escalation.

This is a lot more labour-intensive than an email scam where you can send millions out with one button-push.  Somebody has to physically go out and do it.  They must have decided that the hit-rate would be significantly higher than with email to make it worth the trouble and risk.

As a result I was dead against the government’s intention to hold a whipped vote on witholding details of MPs’ expenses.  The way I see it, some MPs have been taking the mickey with expenses, getting them all tarred with the same brush, and the only way to restore some semblance of public trust is to make them public in the hope that it will deter them from even making extravagant claims.

I still believe that, but this evening I looked into the detail a bit more and found that what the government was actually proposing was not the step backwards that the headlines were suggesting: just the normal disappointing step forward that is far too small.

Expenses are already published, broken down into 9 categories.  Expanding that to 26 is an improvement, depending on the categories.  Breaking down the notorious second home allowance to separate rent/mortgage/council tax/utilities and other essentials on a second home and furnishings would be a huge improvement.  It would make it very clear if somebody already owned a home outright and was claiming £20,000 a year on unessential improvements and furnishings. ¹

What would be even better would be an itemised list.  It need not be difficult to collect the data and publish it – having some sort of online expenses system where claimants (or their staff) type in the details of claims would mean the data would be there to be harvested.

That is something I would be 100% behind, but I think that everybody is getting hung up over the issue receipts.  My initial thoughts were that not publishing receipts was tantamount to trying to hide something, a view promoted by the press and intense lobbying by theyworkforyou amongst others.  Having stopped to think about it this evening I can now see Harriet Harman’s point of view.

I have had some involvement in document management before.  It is hard enough when you are dealing with A4 documents you can put into a hopper by the hundred, but mixed sized, going right down to till receipts, including crumpled paper that has been shoved in wallets and with the ever-present chance of staples being involved…  would be a nightmare.  And then editing them to obscure details?  Sounded like a niggle, but I just looked at my latest receipt from Comet: sure enough it has my address and phone number on it.

Having thought about it I came to the conclusion that the receipt thing is a big red herring.  By all means demand that MPs have to supply recipts to the accounting department to back up claims, but if there is an itemised list, why would we, as members of the public, want to see the receipt in 99.9% of cases?

If publishes expenses are properly itemised and show shop/supplier, goods, and price I reckon I would be happy.  The figure given is that there are 1.3 million receipts involved.  Many of them will be for small amounts and for totally uncontroversial items.  It might be that only a few would be of interest  so why spend a small fortune scanning and photoshopping more than a million receipts that will never be looked at?

My suggestion would be to publish a complete list, and make individual receipts available on demand for a small charge to cover the costs of administration and any necessary obscuring of personal details.  The actual documents themselves will already be held centrally, having been supplied with the claims.

For that reason I would now also support the notion of not automatically publishing all receipts – but I would expect a bit more detail than a mere 26 categories, much as that is an improvement on what we get now.

PS

I think we  – or the media on our behalf – aer also hung up on plasma TVs.  Examples of profligate spending always include the buying of plasma TVs as if that is excessive.  I think some people are living in the past.

A few years ago plasma TVs were that much bigger and a thousand pounds more expensive than ‘normal’ TVs.  Buying one then was a luxury rather than essential.  Anyone who has ventured into Currys or Comet recently will have noticed that plasma and LCD televisions are now the norm.  In fact a plasma can now be the cheap option compared to an LCD set.

If you consider a TV as essential – which it may be for somebody who has to keep on top of the news – then having a plasma is not unreasonable.   The fact that everyone treats plasma as a catch-all term for thin TVs, including LCDs is less serious but does wind up the pedant in me.

Pointing to plasma TVs as an example of conspicuous consumption is as behind-the-times as criticising somebody for having an eleectric kettle when there is a perfectly good hob to put their kettle on without having to indulge in such new-fangled gadgets.

1. A great pity MPs already rejected moves to restrict such things to 10% of the allowance

I am talking, of course, about the now-legendary agreement by the developers of Highwod Park, Broadfield to install traffic calming measures on Woodmans Hill. I last wrote about this just over a year ago and nothing has changed at all except we are one year on and therefore a little less likely to ever see the improvements made.

To summarise the events:

• In 2002/3 (can’t remember exactly when) there was a design brief to develop the old council depot behind Vulcan Close. After consulting nearby residents we got a clause inserted that any developer would have to do something about calming traffic on Woodmans Hill.

• In 2003/4 (again I can’t remember the exact date) planning permission was granted with a condition that before the 19th unit was occupied the developers put traffic calming measures on Woodmans Hill.

• By October 2005 half the houses were built and show homes were seeing a regular stream of visitors, despite the houses being tremendously expensive for what they are.

• Early in 2006 the houses and flats were starting to fill up. I asked my local councillor¹ about it and they asked questions on my behalf. The answer was that the developers wanted to do their S106 work around Christmas 2005 but were asked to postpone it until after the holidays.

• By mid-2007 the estate was complete and full and no traffic calming had been done at all. A friendly reporter made some enquiries for me and was told by the council’s planning department that the work had already been done.

• Early this year I heard a rumour from a very trusted source that one of the councils had pursued the developers through the courts to get them to fulfil their obligations and that work would be carried out over Easter. I wasn’t sure whether that meant Easter weekend or the schools’ Easter holidays so I waited until both had been and gone, and still nothing has happened.

And that is where we are today. More than 30 months after building started and at least two years after the places were occupied and traffic still zooms up and down Woodmans Hill – with its school crossing at the bottom – totally uncalmed. And then… I open up Crawley Live to be told about all the good things being done under Section 106. It is frustrating.

And now a little postscript to all of that by way of some things I found on the Internet:

Thing one: according to this document, Belwinch Homes won an award for the development at Highwood Park. The award was for “South East Pride in the Job 2006″ Not too proud to wriggle out of their legal obligations though. How proud will they be if someone is run down at the bottom of the hill?

Thing two: its probably nothing, but on both Google Maps and Multimap the road layout at Highwood Park is wrong. They both show access directly from the A23 via the junction for Broadfield House. Why is that? The original plan was very clear that access should be via Woodmans Hill so that the new houses were not isolated and would be a proper part of Broadfield, and that is how they were built. How did a map showing access via the A23 ever get drawn up?

Thing three: on the mouseprice site Highwood Park is listed as the No. 43 in the list of most expensive streets in the whole RH11 postcode area. Must have been a nice little earner for Bellwinch homes. Not that I entirely believe that site – my own road is up in the 20s on that list and it is almost entirely rented social housing.

So, Section 106. It can be a good thing, but sometimes it is not worth the paper it is written on.

1. three guesses who

My favourite bits of the story:

Mr Donne said Mote had worked tirelessly for the European Parliament, travelling extensively to meet his constituents as well as attending meetings and acting as a “thorn” in the side of the European Union by “exposing corruption”.

If he is so keen on exposing corruption, I wonder why he tried to have reporting restrictions imposed on his court case. That was after his attempts to claim legal immunity from prosecution failed.

The court heard that Mote ran a successful public relations company employing 30 full-time staff until it collapsed in 1990

It was a successful company until it failed? Isn’t that a bit like someone jumping out of a tall building and claiming a successful unpowered flight right up to the point they hit the pavement?

My least favourite parts of the story:

The offences, totalling £65,506, occurred between February 1996 and September 2002 while Mote was living in Langley, Crawley [*]

In other words, well before he was elected. But its worse than that – he knew that proceedings were imminent and managed to keep it quiet until straight after his election. Would so many voters have gone for UKIP if they had known? Worst of all:

But 71-year-old Ashley Mote, a former Ukip representative, will retain his seat in Europe because he would only have been disqualified if he had received a term of imprisonment of more than 12 months.

Will he still get paid for the 9 months he is unable to do his job? Will he do the honourable thing and resign?

[*] Some confusion here. I think its Langley, West Sussex and not Langley Green in Crawley, West Sussex.

How do they do that?

For speeches and TV appearances there is an indication of the range a payment was in (eg £10,001 to £15,000). The highest earner is said to be William Hague: do the papers add up his 22 lots of earning from speeches etc. and assume they were all top of the range or bottom, or ust take an average? Remunerated directorships are listed, but with no indication at all of the level of remuneration. I suppose you can get that from the companies’ accounts if you dig hard enough. Gifts, sponsorship, shares and trips abroad are all listed but not valued.

It seems to me like it must be 90% guesswork to say how much an MP earns from outside interests and yet all the papers seem to come up with the same guess.

Its quite astonishing reading really, to see how many directorships some of them can clock up. From working with our own MP I know that the basic job can easily take up most of the weekdays, well into the evening, with any free time being nights and weekends – and most of the weekends are taken up with attending various local functions. If they can manage to be directors of one or more companies they have to be either short-changing their constituents or their shareholders unless… unless being a non-executive director really does involve no work at all. How do you get that gig?

A lot of the criticism, implied and overt, seems to be aimed at earnings from newspaper columns, but I can’t see the problem with that. I don’t expect an MP to work every single hour. They have to have some leisure time, and if their idea of leisure is to write and some paper is foolish enough to pay them for it, thats fair enough. And I don’t think it presents as much of a conflict of interests as being on the board of some property or defence company.

It almost goes without saying that our local Sussex Tories are the ones lining up directorships, while the Liberal and Labour MPs just have the odd working trip somewhere. No wonder Henry Smith and Mike Weatherly are champing at the bit… the £60K salary is small change compared to the fringe benefits they can line up.

But despite all that, the figure which, in my opinion, takes the prize for most shocking is George Galloway’s estimated £300,000 of extra income and the huge list of radio shows, TV shows and books which generate it. The first question is how he finds the time to represent the people of Bethnal Green and Bow at all, but the big question is how he can square it with his party’s principles.

I have chatted with the bloke who stood for the Democratic Socialist Alliance in Crawley, and he made a great deal about the fact that , if elected, he would only draw a worker’s wage and not the full MP’s salary. An easy promise to make when you don’t stand a chance, but I got the feeling he was sincere and would have actually done that. (Much as I respect the intention I know I would not have the willpower to do that myself) Respect has much the same rhetoric, and yet their most high-profile member is quite happy to say he represents the working classes while demonstrating an inability to get by on at least three times what they earn on average. Hardly what you would call solidarity is it?

7 were just spam/advertising
Of those 3 were what I would call dodgy – software for 20% of the list price, or obscure mails with just a link to a geocities URL

3 were fraudulent phishing attempts – two purporting to be from the Alliance & Leicester and one supposedly from Barclays.

1 was probably a genuine e-mail from Egg.com but I treat any e-mails from banks to be potentially fraudulent and never click on a link in them on principle.

1 was a real, proper e-mail from another human being who I know.

The ‘Barclays’ e-mail was worrying. It looked very convincing compared to the usual attempts. In its first paragraph it even said:

Some customers have been receiving an email claiming to be from Barclays advising them to follow a link to what appear to be a Barclays web site, where they are prompted to enter their personal Online Banking details. Barclays is in no way involved with this email and the web site does not belong to us.

That could easily fool someone not in the habit of checking the headers on e-mails, and who didn’t spot the ’s’ missing from the end of ‘appears’.

They were doing quite well until the PS which started: “We have asked few additional information which is going to be the part of secure login process.”

So the old rule of thumb still applies – if an e-mail looks like it has been translated from another language using Babelfish then its a fraud!

The other dead giveaway is a URL listed in the mail, which displays a totally different destination in the status area at the bottom of Outlook. I did a trace of who the domain belonged to, found that it is registered to a gospel news organisation in the US and forwarded the mail to them.

My problem at the moment is with a used-car dealer…

When I bought my old Astra, years ago, from Astral Car Sales in Lowfield Heath, I had a good experience. When the Astra was on its last legs earlier this year, that was the first place I went for a replacement, but they didn’t have anything in which I fancied and could afford so we tried a few other places before finding the Laguna.

When we got the Astra, the dealers guaranteed it. They did this by including in the price three months of insurance to cover repairs. As it happened we did have a fault develop in the computer and they got it all sorted out straight away free of charge.

The people who sold us the Renault do not bundle in this insurance, but do push you to take up (and pay for) a similar insurance deal. Having had a happy experience with it before I took them up on the offer.

Now we have had some trouble with the car, took it to the garage to sort out, and found out that the insurance company have no record of the car at all. Either there was some cock-up with the administration, or the car dealer is pocketing the premium himself and keeping his fingers crossed that nothing goes wrong. The insurance company said we should ask for our money back, which I am certainly going to do.

Whether or not I name and shame the car dealer here and through chats with local press reporters depends on what sort of response I get. In other words on whether I get my money back gracefully. I have called Trading Standards too and one of their experts is supposed to be calling me back. Before I speak to xxx Ltd it would be interesting to know if anyone else has had similar problems and whether Trading Standards think there is the slightest chance of getting more than just my money back – maybe the interest on it since April or something.

I am being a bit coy about the dealers. While I am only too happy to bandy about the names of companies who I have had a good service from I don’t like to point the finger without being certain its not just an oversight. Having made so many mistakes myself in the past I find them easier to forgive than deliberate conniving.