Yet another client reported they had been cold called by a company, name given as Global Computer Solutions, claiming their computer had errors.
They mentioned that Microsoft had passed on information to them that this persons computer had errors on it along with their contact details.
Of course anyone with some privacy wits about them would know that Microsoft would probably be breaching numerous privacy laws if this was the case. Come to think of it, when was the last time you bought a computer and registered Microsoft Windows with Microsoft (eg giving them your personal details)?

When challenged as to their identity, the caller gave their name and a number that could be called to verify who they were. Funnily enought they have a Melbourne office.
Well, not really, they just have a Melbourne number: 03 90160451 which I suspect just redirect back to India where the call centre is. (am I suspecting too much?)

Using my trusty friend Google, I see that this phone number is listed on two other computer repair websites.

http://azurepcsolutions.com

http://homepcsolution.com

Funnily enough they have other numbers for other countries and also, gee, the company’s addres is in West Bengal, India.

I’d really like to hope that the ACCC and the phone companys would jump on these companys and disconnect their services promptly. (or at least their local services)

Graham Cluley and his guest Sean Richmond discussed this very issue on a podcast.
Check it out, it’s not very long.

(Sophos 05 November 2010, duration 6:15 minutes, size 4.5MBytes)

In fact I reccomend you use the Sophos Naked Security blog as a trusted source of information about security related issues in the IT world, covering Facebook and Twitter to general security issues and news.
They make it very accessable for all user levels. They’re on Facebook too.

To those in the IT industry or those that have some web sense, these scams are nothing new. To those that are new to this, I hope this helps educate you.
To Google, I hope this helps add to the information that is already out there about these frauds to assist those looking for information.

And that number again just to make sure Google picks it up: 03 9016 0451 0390160451

It’s new in it’s factory sealed box.
It’s a pretty beefy laptop with an i7 intel processor in it along with a mobile broadband card. HP model XP888PA.

As tempting as this is to keep it as a business asset, I’d rather spend the momey on a Windows slate device such as the ASUS EP121

It’s RRP is $3,449 and it wholesale purchase price was around $3,150.
If you’d like to make me an offer (at this stage, i’ll consider anything), please do!

Here are some stats for you.

10,603 Km travelled

1,040 Litres of Fuel
$1,669 spent on fuel

9.8 litres per 100km, average

Most expensive fuel, $2.05 per litre (Balladonia WA ?)
Average fuel price, $1.60 per litre

Number of times tyres inflated and deflated, approximately a dozen.

497.7 gigabytes of video footage shot by the car cam
160+ hours of video footage shot by the car cam

1690 photos taken (Stephen probably took 5 times as many)

Number of times Stephen slept in the car, approximately a dozen.

Number of bottles of wine purchased, 16.

The final day in the roadtrip first took us east, back across the boarder to Mildura. Today was another 700 odd km day but we did make a few stops. We stopped in Mildura down at Lock 11 where we found it currently not active due to the river level being so high. I didn’t release the weir on the other side of the island (Lock Island) is completely removable. It’s currently up on dry land possibly looking like it’s having some repairs done to it.

Next stop was for lunch in Sea Lake and my first decent coffee in 3 weeks. Why does coffee just taste better in Victoria?

After another seemingly endless  straight road, we arrived in Whycheproof which has the distinction of being the only town in Victoria where a train travels down the main street. I’m pretty sure that I travelled on a SteamRail trip about 15 years ago that did exactly that. It’s hard to find any information confirming that the line is currently in use, although in the past few years it seems it has been for grain transport. There is a K series locomotive on static display next to the old turntable and they’ve restored the station building.

Next stop wasn’t until Bendigo for fuel and then on to Melbourne.

Sections of the road today were rolling fields of tumbling grass or weed. It was almost like driving through snow with drifts of this stuff piled up against fences and along the side of the road. It made the drive a lot more scenic that it otherwise would have been.

Today was the second last day of this epic roadtrip and to be honest, it doesn’t really feel like I’ve been away for three weeks.
Much of todays driving did seem to be going through grain country again although that turned into pasture and then fruit tree and vine.

First detour today was up to Quorn, heading through the Pichi Richi Pass beside the Pichi Richi Railway. I did go on the railway many years ago, but can’t remember much accept for Woolshed Flat where the engine is turned around using a triangle. (think triangle but with inward curving sides)
I’d forgotten how beautiful the terrain is through the pass. I guess that’s the whole Flinders Ranges. I’ll have to get that into another trip and next time when the train is running.

Back south, we headed into the Mount Remarkable National Park to check out the Alligator Gorge. A dull day for gorge visiting and absolutely no-one else there. It also seems to be the park of upside-down speed bumps.

I thought we might be heading down through the Barossa Valley today on mission to find big things but didn’t get that far. We did however journey through the Clare Valley which is also wine country (Although Annie’s Lane is the only winery I recognised).
I was surprised to see an F/A 18 Super Hornet fly over (it certainly looked like the super hornet) as we drove through the valley. I assume it was flying out of RAAF Edinburgh as part of the Aircraft Research and Development Unit (ARDU) based there.

Todays primary big or giant object was the Big Miner in Kapunda. We found him and also found out that Kapunda is claimed to be Australia’s first mining town with the copper being mined there from 1842 until 1879.

From the Clare Valley all the way up to Morgan we seemed to be following old railway lines in various states from just the reservation existing to rails still existing. I get the impression this area used to be very rail heavy with three different gauge railways operating.

In Morgan we met the mighty Murray River and I must say I’m impressed at how high it is (certainly the highest I can ever remember seeing it).
We crossed the river by car ferry at Cadell and continued following the river through Ramco and Waikerie where we joined the Sturt Highway. Here we unexpectedly found another big object in the form of a giant Orange Tree. From a distance, my first comment was “the big diseased fruit”.

Driving onwards, we were really in fruit country, driving through endless landscapes of fruit trees. This lead us into Berri, known for its fruit juice company but also evidently Australia’s biggest winery, Berri Estate. (on their sign) ? I’ve never heard of them.
Our primary mission in Berri was to find the Big Orange. Once again using vague directions and knowing that the fabled orange was now closed, we set about looking anyway. Success!

We’re now in Renmark for the night, a town (probably like many on the Murray) that has lots of houseboats.

Tomorrow onto more of the Murray and finally home.

Have I missed something? When did you need to register for search engines?

Anyway, this is here more as search engine fodder. I figure the more people that report this, the more likely it will appear in Google for those checking the authenticity of an email. (and I’m not the only one reporting this, others have too)

According to WHOIS, the SCAMMER appears to be Mark Denaro, csrgmarketing@gmail.com.

The domain being used in the SCAM emails is http://domainregistrat.com which when visited without the unique path, redirects you to http://iglobalmerchantservices.com/contact which seems to be a merchant services company. I don’t think I’d trust them.

The full WHOIS record (which is where he is scrapping your details from) is:

Domain Name: DOMAINREGISTRAT.COM
Registrar: MONIKER

Registrant [2949841]:
        Mark Denaro csrgmarketing@gmail.com
        RG
        200 Park Avenue South
        New York
        NY
        10003
        US

Administrative Contact [2949841]:
        Mark Denaro csrgmarketing@gmail.com
        RG
        200 Park Avenue South
        New York
        NY
        10003
        US
        Phone: +1.13474605327

Billing Contact [2949841]:
        Mark Denaro csrgmarketing@gmail.com
        RG
        200 Park Avenue South
        New York
        NY
        10003
        US
        Phone: +1.13474605327

Technical Contact [2949841]:
        Mark Denaro csrgmarketing@gmail.com
        RG
        200 Park Avenue South
        New York
        NY
        10003
        US
        Phone: +1.13474605327

Domain servers in listed order:

        NS1.WORLDWIDEPROMOTING.COM
        NS2.WORLDWIDEPROMOTING.COM

        Record created on:        2010-07-20 20:08:08.0
        Database last updated on: 2010-12-03 15:08:52.487
        Domain Expires on:        2011-07-20 20:08:09.0

Original email:

View Larger Map

View Larger Map

The last three days have seen us cover over 2000km on our journey towards home. That’s the problem when you travel so far, you have to travel back.
Day 18 was the longest by far at over 1000km.

Day 17, we did a two and a half hour tour of the KCGM Superpit which was very interesting. Although we didn’t get right into the superpit, we did get to some of the internal lookouts and get to see the vehicles and buildings up close.

After hanging around for the disappointing 1pm blast in the superpit, we got on the, largely boring, road to Balladonia.
One very pleasant place we detoured into is Newman Rock. If I drove back to Perth, I’d definitely camp here. I could have happily stayed a while longer watching the two ducks in the pond.

Day 18 was just driving. We did detour about 20km along the old road (now a track) into Eucla before arriving in Ceduna for the night.

View from Eucla over the plain.

Sunset along the Ceduna jetty. (for a better shot, see Stephen’s photo here)

Day 19, we drove down around Thevenard and then headed back to the Eyre Highway. After some km’s we detoured back on the dirt down south to Murphy’s Haystacks and then back north-east to the Eyre again.

We detoured north from Minnipa to a bunch of rocks, namely Pildappa Rock.

This seems to be Wave Rock’s lesser know cousin and although not quiet as impressive, it is still pretty interesting.

View from the top.

The other rock we went to was Mt Wudinna which is claimed to be the second largest rock in Australia.

Now in Port Augusta for the second last night of the trip.

Today really was a lazy day. We left the motel around midday and went down to Boulder to look at the monthly market day.

Doing some research last night, we found out that many of the museums in Boulder are currently closed due to earthquake damage. Evidently there was an earthquake on the 20th April 2010 that caused damaged to many historic buildings. (we had wondered why we saw so many with scaffolding around them)
This did make it a pretty short stroll around town and was disappointing as I was hoping to see the historic Philip Goatcher Curtain in the town hall.

The art deco styled Palace Theatre and the Boulder Town Hall.

Some of the classic cars offering rides to raise money for the local cancer charity.

The other item on list for the lazy day was the Mining Hall of Fame, but before that, the superpit lookout once again.

The Mining Hall of Fame attraction in Kalgoorlie.

The huge CAT 793C dump truck on display. We did a guided tour up onto the cab deck. Some of the wear marks and bends in the steel were impressive. The rocks in the mine must be incredibly heavy to cause the damage.

The other attraction that we primary went for was the gold pour. A KCGM employee who also works at the Hall of Fame, talked about the process to extract the gold out of the rock and then performed a gold pour into an ingot. In this case, it was only 35% gold (65% copper) as insurance companies won’t let them do a higher percentage.

The actual Mining Hall of Fame building must still be a work in progress as it had some large areas basically empty.

Tomorrow morning we go on a 2.5 hour tour of the Superpit and associated areas.

Today’s journey was a relatively short trip to Kalgoorlie, however in our usual style, we found plenty of detours to make the journey take a little longer.

We headed via another huge rock formation called The Humps and up the 170km road to Marvel Loch. This is basically a small mining town with plenty of old abandoned mines around along with a few decent sized open cut mines that are still active.
After Marvel Loch, we took a track out to the abandoned May Queen Mine and on the track drove through a large spider web, with large spider included. (I moment I wish I had the video running at 60 fps.)

After a fuel stop (for us, not the car) in Southern Cross, we headed along the Great Eastern Highway to Pumping Station number 6. This is the ruins of one of the historic pumping stations that was part of the Goldfields Water Supply Scheme. This scheme delivered water via a huge pipeline to the towns of Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie. It’s still in use today but utilizing modern pumping stations.

The pumping station and one of the locals.

From the pumping station, we followed the pipeline for about 5km before getting back down to the main road. Next side trip was the Karalee Dam and Rock.
Once again, this rock had been used to collect water and this time a long iron aqueduct had been constructed between the rock and dam.

Following on from this, we detoured beside the pipeline again between Woolgangie and the No.8 pumping station along the Golden Pipeline Trail.

Getting to Coolgardie, we stopped past the old railway station and an abandoned opencut mine.

We are now in Kalgoorlie for the next two nights where we’ll be checking out the Boulder Market Day and then doing a tour of the KCGM Superpit gold mine (Largest opencut in Australia). We did stop by the lookout and take few shots just after sunset. Absolutely huge.

Day 14 took us down to the Perth coast. There was a sculpture thing on at Cottesloe beach all of March but we didn’t see more than what on the foreshore. The coffee in Cottesloe was horrible, as expected, and I’m now convinced the best coffee in Australian is in Melbourne (and probably Fabric in Southbank).
We travelled up the coast as far as Scarborough which was still pretty much as I remember it with only a few alterations to the carpark layout.

We decided we’d seen enough coast for a while and jumped onto the Reid Highway to head out of town. The Reid Highway is much like the Monash Freeway was in Melbourne when it was the South Eastern Arterial, originally built without overpasses. Now it must be getting the traffic volumes as they are now being built causing a few slow patches of traffic.
I am convinced that it is impossible to get a green light on that road as we stopped at every set of traffic lights on the highway.

The trip east took us out to Northam where the train station looked like Spencer Street in the 80’s and then onto York.

Mount Brown lookout above York.

On the way into a town called Corrigin we came across a dog cemetery. The seem to love their dogs and set a world record for the most number of dogs in a ute in 2002 with 1527.

Scooby Doo? We now know where you are.

We got into Hyden reasonably early so checked in before heading down to wave rock. It’s just an incredible natural sculpture and the rock itself is absolutely huge.

I wasn’t aware beforehand that they built a small wall around the top of the rock to collect water and funnel it into a dam for drinking water. (now used for cattle only)

Wall visible above the wave.
(the photo of me taking this photo is here)

On the way back to the carpark I came across a tree that reminded me of the one Horton the Elephant sat in.