Tag Archives: scams

Fees and services

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Have you noticed how customer convenience is no longer a priority? We are consumers to be targeted for maximum profit. It’s not a world where the customer is always right, but rather the customer is always ripe… for squeezing out a few dollars more.

Example 1: I went to book a flight for my summer visit to see my mom in Toronto. In the airline website the lowest price didn’t even include a carry-on bag, just a personal item. When I looked at the next price option up, with the only added feature being a carryon bag, the cost was over $140 more. That’s before paying even more to pre-select a seat.

Example 2: We used to pay for premium channels on TV, they still had commercials but they also had movies and shows regular cable didn’t have. Along came streaming. Anytime watching and no commercials. You pay a premium and you avoid those annoying interruptions. Now commercials are back unless you pay a premium on top of your premium.

Everything is tiered not to provide you with better service, but to make the tiers such that you never want the cheap deals. No, you are enticed into paying more to get what you used to get for less. You are priced out of the deal that got you to consider the purchase, and put into flashy named premium, executive, and luxury levels that cost more to add features that you used to expect as the basic minimum.

“Bundle and Save!”

This sounds great, if the bundle didn’t actually just give you things you actually needed. If the bundle really added luxury rather than essentials. Who travels from Vancouver to Toronto with just a purse or a small backpack that can fit under the seat in front of you? Is that really an option? 

‘Customer’ used to mean more than a ‘mark’ to be deceived and taken advantage of with added fees for basic necessities. Good service used to be a value added, not an added service charge. It used to be that fees and services added real value, but now they are simple a means to expect the customer to pay more… for less.

Own your own domain

Background: In March of 2008 I purchased DavidTruss.com, DavidTruss.org, and DavidTruss.net. I didn’t start my blog on Google’s Blogger, or on Edublogs, or one of the ‘user-friendly’ blogging websites, I used Elgg, which I was invited onto by a friend, and it was clunky. To make changes to the look of my blog I had to play with the HTML. I often tried and failed, and I learned a lot that I would not have learned on an easier site. However, they sold out to Eduspaces, which in the transition killed a lot of my backlinks. Then it looked like Eduspaces was going to change again after I had spent hours cleaning things up, and I got fed up and decided to own my own domain name. I reserved the .com, .org, and .net as the most popular addresses, and I keep all 3 with the .org and .net being pointed to the .com site, (so if you go to DavidTruss.org it auto re-directs to DavidTruss.com).

I keep the .org and .net domains only for vain reasons… Search for David Truss online and you’ll probably find me for most of the links, and I like it that way. Maybe one day I’ll stop paying for the other domains, but for now, I will keep all 3 addresses. For a fun explanation of why my first blog was called ‘Pair-a-Dimes’ you can find the story here, under Why ‘Pair-a-Dimes for Your Thoughts’? For this Daily-Ink you can learn more by reading Why Blog Daily or The act of writing, where I coined my byline: “Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.” 

The current backdrop: That’s a lot of reminiscing, so what value am I going to add here? The reality is that it is getting more and more difficult to parse truth from lies, and deep fakes from actual audio and video clips. Things go viral without fact-checking, and it would be easy for someone malicious to spread misinformation about you, me, or anyone else. We know that lies spread faster than the truth in social media and this is only getting worse. Soon, you won’t be able to trust anything that comes to you on social media and what will matter most is where you get your information from. The sources you trust will matter, although even these you may have to evaluate. For those sources you don’t already know and trust will be handled with caution and doubt… even when the message is something you want to believe.

Why own your own domain? While you might think that deep fakes are things only celebrities and politicians need to worry about, the reality is that ‘regular’ people are already getting scammed with technology that used to cost thousands of dollars but can now be done free with AI tools. While your own domain won’t help with an impersonation scam like the one I just linked to, your digital identity will be much easier to misappropriate. My voice and image are on the internet. There are quite a few photos and videos of me online, and so there is enough data for someone to create an AI enhanced video of me saying whatever the culprits decide will be funny, insulting, mean, our downright disgusting. A funny version of this was a prank a former student pulled where he and other students uwuify’d some images of me while I was on a social media sabbatical. This was harmless fun, and never intended to impersonate me, but the technology is now there for anyone to do this.

Your domain means you control the narrative. Your own domain means that if something is being shared that you didn’t create, you can point to reliable information. If you have your own website, that’s where you can share your perspective on things, and it isn’t controlled by anyone else. Someone can create a Facebook profile that looks just like mine, and use my images on it. Someone can create a @davidatruss or @datruss1 account on Twitter and make it look like I’m the one saying what they want me to say. A Youtube channel would be just as easy to set up as well. Whereas DavidTruss.com is my domain. I own it. I control the narrative. And… I have a big enough digital footprint that people can see it’s not some site that was just put up a week ago. Does this make me bulletproof to a scam? Absolutely not! But it gives me some leverage to share my own voice if I do get impersonated.

Your domain, your words, your narrative.

Scam prevention: As a final thought, to prevent scams where family members are impersonated, have a ‘safe word’ that you share in times of distress. Not your pet’s name or anything like that. Choose a word that even people you might know wouldn’t guess, like ‘apricot’ or ‘gazebo’ or a phrase like ‘This is extra sauce important’!

Buyer Beware!

Do you shop online? If you do, you probably rely on customer reviews to help you vet the quality and reliability of a product, and the company selling the product. However, those reviews are being gamed in a number of ways!

I’ve always known that some reviews are fake. Click on a profile of a reviewer and you see that they have recommended 15 products. Check those reviews out and it turns out that most of them are for the same product under different listings. Does that person really need 12-15 of the same product when you need only one? Are they buying, for example, 14 Bluetooth headphones and rotating through them daily for 2 weeks, then reviewing each one, but only bothering to do that for this one product? Unlikely.

However, I just came across an entire product line search on Amazon where the vast majority of products, iPhone headphone jacks, didn’t only have fake reviews, the items being sold had reviews for completely different products!

What made this worse was that some of these were ‘sponsored’ and one of them was marked ‘Amazon’s Choice’.

Looking at the first 8 reviews on display for this product, 7 of them are high ratings for a computer hard drive, and the one actual review for the product was a 1-star review saying the product stopped working after a couple weeks.

I don’t always go to the reviews when I see high star ratings by many reviewers, but the price seemed way too low to be good. This is definitely a case of buyer beware! The scammers are gaming Amazon, and I’m sure they are gaming other sites as well… don’t get ‘star struck’ and be sure to read a few of the reviews.