Slashdot Mirror
'Free Broadband' Scam Exposed
dslknowitall writes: "It appears that http://www.dslreports.com is first on the crime scene regarding DSLmonster.com's scam to offer free broadband access for the price of only two spam's a day (remember winfire, anyone?).
"If you remember back on December 18th we raised the warning flag concerning a DSL provider known as DSLMonster.com, who's business stank of illegitimacy. With a website made up of plagiarized portions of other providers terms of service, and a qualification system that claimed it could provide service to locations like "the dark side of the moon", it appeared to be a scam waiting to happen." Not only a well written piece but lots o' backgroud too!"
Not@home
tcd004
You get what you pay for. Especially online.
Unless you get less than what you pay for.
Almost never do you get more than you pay for.
We can't get something for free??? We have to pay for things??? This is anti-open source! I refuse to believe it!!
As it turns out, our scrutiny only helped to improve the scam, as our users nitpicking of the sites inconsistencies provided a template for DSLMonster to author a more convincing website that would appear a month later and would lead to more bilked customers.
I just hope people don't get angry at DSLReports for what they did. They were only trying to provide a service for their readers.
According to the employees of DSLMonster, many of whom seemed to have legitimate DSL industry experience, they claim they were completely unaware of Mr. Dyer's plans...
The Enron defense, anyone? How can people in a compnay not know of the plans by management. Anyone in the billing department, for example, would have seen the excessive billing practices.
Hard to believe it's been a year (almost to the day).
Winfire article
That was less scammy than this one though. Winfire was built on the solid premise that people would stay crazy and pour money into crazy ventures for at least another two years.
Detective Shelton informed us that he believes Dyer has fled the area. Dyer supposedly had a New Jersey driver's license, but New Jersey law prohibits releasing the photo.
Umm, perhaps New Jersey law can make an exception in cases of suspected fraud? I don't understand how a photo of a suspect who pretty much appears to have ripped off consumers and advertisers alike has to be kept private, while he gets away more and hides his identity.
I respect privacy, but I think I can make an exception for this guy.
Please subscribe to see the more insightful version of th
I would think if I was an employee at this company, I'd start to wonder just when we were going to start installing anything.. for pete's sake, you can't tell me the employees didn't have a clue what was going on, unless of course they were too busy bidding on figurines at eBay, and watching their Enron stock plummet....
If the service was only supposed to cost users "two spams a day", how did they pocket a bunch of money? Did you have to leave a deposit or what?
regarding DSLmonster.com's scam to offer free broadband access for the price of only two spam's a day
What a second. The linked article says that customers were double and triple billed. What did they get 4-6 spams instead of 2? Or is this statement wrong and there was a cost for the service?
The Anti-Blog
While this ISP was not as much of a sham as the ISP the articule links to, they had an executive with access to the company's purse strings. This person outright stole money from the company's bank account for personal use; we are talking about millions of dollars here. Finally, when the company went bankrupt one or two years later, this crook fled the country, and, as far as I know, is living in the Carribian.
Similar to how Enron did things; get a lot of investment money; start a company, hire employees and pay off congressmen to give the company an air of legitimacy; then take as much money from the company bank account as one can get away with. Do this until the company dies and the executives are living in the bahamas.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
Here's the monetary impact the scam had:
According to detective Shelton, as many as 250 customers were double and triple billed, without a single one receiving so much as a minute of DSL service. Local area advertisers were also out of luck, as checks from Mr. Dyer repeatedly bounced. Employees felt the sting as well, scammed out of thousands of dollars.
I guess they forgot a crucial step of Microsoft's business plan: if you're going to copy everyone else and offer something that's too good to be true, you have to have the MONEY to back it up.
~ now you know
And they say kids never listen to their parents. Looks like it's the other way around.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I really feel for the people who got ripped off yet...
.sig lunch-lady Dorris?" "Yes, yes we do." "Then .sig me up woman!" "Okey dokey."
Isn't the first rule of life, on the internet especially, is that if it says it is free, you DO NOT give out your credit card number? Just a thought.
--"Do you have any
For the heck of it, I ran a Google Search for "Corey Dyer" "New Jersey" and it brought up one white pages entry. Maybe it's him, maybe it's not. Might as well try.
"You're never ready, just less unprepared."
access for the price of only two spam's a day
I want to lower my SPAM to only two a day! Where can I get that kind of service?
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
If they'd provided service to 10% of their customers, and stalled the others, they could have kept this scam going for years. It would be hard to distinguish that approach from "legitimate" DSL providers.
Of course, any real geek would known that there's no such thing.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Advertisers aside aren't the customers protected by their credit card company? If I order a service with my credit card and the service isn't rendered or a goods not delivered aren't I only liable for up to a certain amount (terms of agreement defined by the credit card company, usually its $50 maximum)
I could have told you it was a scam two words into it; "Free broadband"? Who on earth would believe something like that?
Can they garauntee this? I pay for my current ISP and get a lot more spam than that. This sounds tempting...
I know what the Internet is, what the hell is this Interweb business?!
hawk
Grab the google cache at http://google.com/search?q=cache:Cgn4O0fAfakC:www. dslmonster.com/+&hl=en
Seems to me that we humans are just genetically designed to be bilked and suckered.
How else could things like this have worked?
How else could the whole "Nigerian banking transfer with your help needed desperately" genre still be successful after all these years?
A fool and his money do part quite often.
Any point on the near side of the moon, except during the lunar eclipse, is perpetually illuminated by either the sun or the Earth. Earthlight is much brighter on the moon than moonlight is on the Earth.
In the lunar night, you could see quite well on the bright side of the moon, but the dark side would only be very dimly starlit (respective nights -- not the same time, obviously). It seems to me that lunar colonists are quite likely to say "bright side" and "dark side" for this reason.
People who have the gall to pose as authorities "correcting popular misconceptions," but only look at the most superficial interpretations, disgust me. I've seen a few sites like that, which start out by interpreting common expressions or sayings in some very narrow, technical sense (which the users of those expressions wouldn't recognize), then tear down the straw man they set up, and enjoy a pained sigh for having to live on a planet with the poor idiots who haven't already recognized their obvious correctness. That they also include some well-known true misconceptions only makes them more harmful by making them seem legitimate.
badastronomy.com? Why not everyonebutmeiswrong.com? I hate snobs.
It starts off with:
Bad Astronomy: "That's as remote as the dark side of the Moon!"
Good astronomy: "That's as remote as the far side of the Moon!"
...then goes on to complain about popular song lyrics and generally whine about the fact that anyone has ever used the expression "dark side of the moon."
It finishes with: "The Pink Floyd album may be one of the best selling albums of all time, but astronomically it's in eclipse."
It contains no claim about people being mistaught that one side of the moon is always dark, just a baseless assumption that the expression must be interpreted that way. And it fails as an educational resource by missing a good reason to call the far side the "dark side."
It's obnoxious "ha ha!" nitpicking, but worse for being built on bad reasoning. If it was isolated, I wouldn't have bothered, but it's not the only example on the site: take this, for example. This page doesn't even make sense:
Bad Astronomy: The Moon appears larger on the horizon than overhead because you are comparing it to foreground objects.
Good astronomy: The Moon does appear larger on the horizon, but it is because of the way we perceive the sky.
What the heck is with that? The page itself doesn't contain an explanation of "the way we perceive the sky," and the linked essays actually imply that the presence of foreground objects, particularly the horizon, is a key part of this optical illusion.
At best, he's making a meaningless distinction, and being rude about it. This is characteristic of the site in general, and it is not a worthy reference.
You'd think that people would be smart enough to think that anything with a Free moniker would be a scam. That is just how life is, shit ain't free. Hay wait isn't that Linux thing labeled as fre...*sounds of being flogged by Linux zealots*
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
a website made up of plagiarized portions of other providers terms of service
A lawyer recently informed me that copyright does not apply to legal documents (including terms of service and licenses). I was surprised at first, but then I realized that I've never seen a (c) on any such document.
So it's actually perfectly okay (and probably a good idea) to "steal" the best parts of other well written legal documents, rather than reinvent them. There is standard language for all of these things, so it would be pretty ridiculous to copyright them. It's not plagiarism.