My own link manager (http://top.zealus.com – not active anymore) complained to me that it’s missing the link from my blog to my own web site. What’s am I going to do now, fire me?
Hilarious.
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Author: Zealus
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Credit cards fraud
They found me again!
Today I found several e-mails that were sent to me by payment gateway that several cheap hosting package purchases were declined. Well, $5.95 is not an amount that would send you all the way through bankruptcy court, but when after certain silence you get few declined transactions (and I don’t advertise the fact that I am selling hosting, selling hosting alone proved to be much more headache then doing what I do now) it kind of raises the suspicion. Well, I though, this could be some poor kid trying to get his CS clan up (all “client” e-mails were same), so I went to examine the transaction details.
All of them were – of course – from totally different people, living in totally different places. So that rules out mom and dad’s cards. Next step – the IP addresses, it turned out to be from Amsterdam, Netherlands. Right, that’s where most Americans live and that’s where they conduct their business from. Smoking pot and buying cheapest web hosting plan that was pretty much there for sorting out spammers and scammers… Third sign was that transaction came in every two minutes, which looked like the guy had all the credit cards in front of him. Quite unlikely… I mean you see the six-dollar transaction gets declined you would first get angry and then go after next card… but not so here.
All this leaded me to shut down automatic payment processing. After all, I don’t think now that I have valuable clients on server it would be a good idea to let some greedy kid run his stolen credit cards through my gateway, as well as having constant disputes with stupid PayPal people… but that’s whole another story.
One of the hidden stones you immediately hit while moving web sites from one platform to another is the numerous links that search systems store momentarily become obsolete. Of course there are ways to make old links point to same places but sometimes the construct like http://aquashieldonline.com/cgi-bin/order_form.cfm ?step=2 doesn’t really make any sense anymore… So what you do (especially if you moved from ColdFusion to PHP) is you just make all old links point to the first page and be content… for some time, until you discover that since old links don’t work and new links didn’t propagate yet the site is almost invisible in search engines like Yahoo, Google, MSN and so on…