Evil Bots and Stuff

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I have recently read about different people being arrested for wire fraud. What is “wire fraud”?

How do I protect myself from credit card scam?

i can’t tell the difference. can you? is it a ripoff of google?

T-online is a German Internet Access provider that has taken to stealing traffic with their so-called Navigationshilfe (navigation help). In theory, if you use them and want to go to a website that does not exist this navigational help loads and shows you paid advertising. So it is not even helpful the way it is supposed to work. What they also do is show this help every now and then for real websites that do exisist and have no server problems. I have noumerous times tried to go to my own and other well-known websites, but was instead redirected to that stupid Navigationshilfe. They can call it whatever they want, I call it theft of traffic. It seams more likely that their DNS cache or routers are having some issues and instead of correcting it they just steal the traffic that should go elsewhere. I also tried to contact them several times, but never received an answer. I must add that as a customer you appearently can turn that Navigationshilfe off. But if you are just using someon elses Internet access you can;t turn it off. And as a webmaster like me there is also no way of exluding my website from their traffic theft scheme.

A few years ago I fell for a cheap ad campaign and registered a domain with godaddy.com I was hosting somewhere else as their hosting deals did and still do not offer much for the price they charge. My website was one of those paid to click websites where people become free members and then surf websites for credits or cash. One day I found that my domain was pointing to a new website and my members (several thousand back then) were no longer able to go to my website. After checking a few things I noticed that the DNS settings had been changed. I first thought someone had hacked my account, but I was unable to change the DNS settings in my godaddy account. When I asked godaddy what happened they told me that the domain was involved in spamming and they had changed the DNS settings. Funny how instead of going to a website that explained that it was going to something that only benefited godaddy. I was asked to pay $100 to get my domain unblocked. After further research on-line I found out that one of my website’s members had in fact posted his referral link to several newsgroups. So OK, that action can be considered spam, but it was not done by myself, the owner and webmaster of the domain. I explained that to godaddy and they insisted on the $100 to unblock the domain. If the $100 was paid, it would be OK to spam.

Needles to say, I agreed to be charged $100, then moved my domain away from then, then disputed the payment with my credit card company. While searching on google to see if I was a single case I stumbled on hundreds if not thousands of other people who had their domain hijacked by godaddy and were asked to pay a ransom to get it back. So if you ever find a website you don’t like, check the whois info. If it’s registered with godaddy, all you have to do to cause the webmaster some trouble is to send or post some spam in the name of that domain. Pretty ridiculous, huh?

So never ever register a domain with godaddy.com and heck, never host your website with them! Sooner or later they will screw you over. Godaddy employees have openely admitted on newsgroups that they shut off websites just because they did not like them. I have no idea if this is still going on, but why take a chance? Better be safe than sorry.

Godaddy’s reseller program is also a rip-off. Think about it! Why pay them $99 year so you can make them more money by reselling domain names? Duh! You don’t have to pay to re-sell something! Go find a better reseller program! Your customers will be thankful!