Beware of fraud attempts on Craigslist (apartments, items)

I don't post that often, but I tend to think that my posts hold some interest. This time it holds the form of a warning. Because I have been recently looking for an apartment for rent, I became an unsuspecting potential victim of a scam.

The scam takes the form of an ad on Craigslist, an apartment that you just wouldn't pass out if you had the chance:

$550 / 2br - SPACIOUS 2 BEDROOM APARTMENT FOR RENT (MONTREAL)

Reply to: danieldura73@yahoo.com [?]
Date: 2009-01-21, 5:56PM EST

spacious living room with chracteristic beams & solid wood floor
2 double sized bedrooms
2 Baths
walk in wardrobe
fully equipped
kitchen with built in gas cooker, oven, fridge/freezer, dishwasher, marble surface and practical cupboard space
luxury bathroom with bathtub and seaparate shower
washing machine/dryer combi
presented with solid wooden flooring throughout
inside a recognized city monument
wireless internet connection.

* cats are OK - purrr
* dogs are OK - wooof
* Location: MONTREAL
* it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

PostingID: 1002216171

I replied to this ad asking for information, and got the following reply:

My name is Daniel Dura own the 2 bedroom and 2 Baths home and its located @ 1809 Ontario Street East, Montreal H2K1T5, Quebec , Canada. and also want you to know that it was due to my transfer that makes me my wife and Son to leave the house and also want to give it out for rent and looking for a responsible person that can take very good care of it as we are not after the money for the rent but want it to be clean at the time and the person that will rent it to take it as if it were its own. So for now, We are here in west Africa, our new house and put all my worries off concerning the maintenance of the apartment for, since i am not residing there for now.I left behind some Facilities and electonics which include the rent, and a DVD player, air conditioning, alarm system. The kitchen is fully equipped with all necessary cooking utensils, arefrigerator-freezer, four-hob and oven, microwave, dishwasher and washing machine, My Computer Connected with Internet Acess Also the keys to the House are right here with me, and the lease document. Which i can send to you after all necessary agreement has be accepted. Also i will like you to know that the rent charges is not really the issue ,but your absolute maintenance of my apartment is most important thing so will want you to get back to me with the Application form below


RENT APPLICATION FORM

1)Your Full Name
2)Your Full Address & Phone Number
3)How old are you?
4)Are you married?
5)How many people will be living in the house?
6)Do you have a pet?
7)Do you have a car?
8)Occupation?
9)When do you want to move in
10)How long do you want to stay in my apartment
11)Pictures of all the Occupant that will stay in my apartment


One Mr Richard Thomas called me about the apartment,I told him that I can't give him the apartment because he loves smoking,drinking and dont want him to get drunked and damaged my property one day so If you are still interested, Note that the rent is going to be $550 Per month No extra fees.I will like you to give me a call on this effect to know how serious you are.below is my phone number

002348035722842 OR +2348035722842

I personally will actually come visiting you sometimes during the year as my new tenant.

Looking forward to hear from you with all this details so that i can have it in my file in case of issuing the receipt for you and contacting you. Await your urgent reply so that we can discuss on how to get the document and the keys of the house to you. below is some pictures of the apartment and The address of the house is 1809 Ontario Street East, Montreal H2K1T5, Quebec , Canada.

Thanks
Daniel Dura

I replied to the email with proper information (thinking more and more that this was pretty suspicious), and got a call (yes, a phone call, which is pretty rare in fraud cases) and spoke to the scammer for a few minutes. He indicated that my application was accepted and that he would forward me "his secretary information" so that I could send the first and last month payment, after which he would send me keys and such to visit the apartment... Yes, it was stupid of me to send any information, but I really wanted to know if this was too good to be true. Here's the information he sent me:

Hello,

Thanks very much for your reply, i can see your willingness in this rent how is work? i want you to know that money is not the problem, i will be given you the apartment in good faith.also i want you to know that the apartment is a very good and quite place to stay for you and i want you to take good care of the apartment it is very close to public transportation, grocery store and school. i want you to know that know extra bill because the $550 per month include with all utilities like Gas, Hydro, Electricity, Water and Internet and it's fully funished but you can come with your own furniture if you like as i have a storage in the apartment.I will be here in west africa for 5 years So I Have just forward all your information to my Secretary. and we both agree to take you as my new tenant because you have answered to the rent application perfectly that you are well qualified to rent the apartment. so i congratulate you for that and i am so happy that i and my wife have found a new Tenant for the Apartment. But i want you to know we spend alot on this property so we want you to stand on your word and take good care of the apartment when you MoveIn. the apartment is pleasant neighbourhood. so we want you to know that we are not giving out this apartment because of money but we just want a God Fearing Tenant that will be taking Good care of the apartment and tidy it up. Here are the contents of the document i will be sending to your presence address.

1) Entrance and the Rooms Keys
2) Papers/Permanent house form (Containing Your Refrence Details)
3) The House Document File.
4) Payment Receipt.
5)Contract Lease agreement to be sign.
6) Full Address and Description of House.

So you will need to make the first deposit payment of $550 to my Secretary information below as soon as possible and i can confirm your payment and issue the receipt so the key of the apartment can be shipout to you as soon as possible today . and your payment will start counting the date you will be moving In. So i want you to know that you will need to look for any Western Union Store around you and send the first month deposit payment to my Secretary here below is the information's to wire the money.

Receiver name: DAN LUCKER
Receiver's address: 65 Atunrase Ave
City: Surulere
State: Lagos State
Zipcode: 23401
Country: Nigeria
Text Question : Good
Answer : Better
Amount Sending: $550

So i want you to get back to me with the weestern union confirmation as soon as you send the payment. i will be waiting to hear from you with the western union information on the receipt below:

Full Sender's Name:
Sender's address:
MTCN #:
Text Question & Text Answer:

I will be waiting to read from you soonest. i appreciate your promise once again.

As a last blow I pointed this gentleman (or fracker, whatever you want to call "it") to a website with "scam" in the URL and his phone number on it... I asked him either to provide legal proof he was the owner of the location or else prepare to have his information forwarded to the proper authorities... To which he replied:

Hello,

Thanks for your response, I want you to know that i can't scan the document of my apartment for you. i am also afraid here too just trying to secure my self too. but i will like to know if i can email you with a canadian account information so you can transfer the payment.

Thanks

Daniel

Evidently, it was only after all of this that I finally found all the information to put in his face, a series of other sites pointing to his obvious guilt (other posts, warnings, blog posts and such). Information that, if I had seen earlier, would have prevented me from even sending my address to this arsehole.

In any case, the word is out that this is happening here, in Montreal, and we could all be victims. Don't let your guard down!

Update 15/03/2010: It seems that he is striking again if I believe the comments. The posting on RentSpot has been removed, here's to hoping this post gets seen by more people!

Your User Profile Was Not Loaded Correctly!

I don't normally do things like this, but I thought I'd share a tidbit of wisdom that I've acquired very recently.

Being a junior network administrator of a fully microsoft network means that I sometimes have to dig very deep for solutions for the odd problem that doesn't happen very often.

Today this problem was the configuration of a recently purchased laptop to replace a user's 5 year old and misbehaving lappy. After doing the standard stuff (joining the network, assigning proper admin permissions, installing firewall client and such), I tried logging on the user to configure everything... Only to get a one-minute long "Preparing Desktop..." and then getting the following message: "Your User Profile Was Not Loaded Correctly!" (This was in Vista, the error message is similar in XP and 2000)

After a few minutes of googling the problem I was no closer to a solution to my problem. All the results in the search were about deleting local profiles and registry keys related to the user profile... Which were of no help to me because the local profile never had the chance to even be created.

I finally identified that the issue wasn't on the computer at all when I tried to logon to her profile from another PC and had the same issue! So I started looking elsewhere... On the domain controller. Turns out that there was nonsensical data in the (believe it or not) "Profile path:" box in the Profile tab of the user's properties... And her home folder was misspelled. Honestly, I don't have any clue how that happened or how she was able to access her home folder's files in the first place. But now that this is fixed, everything is fine!

So I pass on this knowledge to the reader. If you ever get a "Your User Profile Was Not Loaded Correctly!" message, if the local profile isn't the issue, take a quick glance at your user's profile settings!

Cheers!
:Lucas

The back-forward step

So you've been watching the automotive market and have heard about the acclaimed new type of cars: The Hybrid. It's trumpeted as being a huge step forward, a great money saver, an appeal to your "I want to save earth in a way that won't cost me nothing" side.

Little do most people know, Hybrids are not a step forward in terms of technology - arguably, they are actually a step back as far as Electrics are concerned. Electric vehicles have been around just as long as the gas ones, and they have evolved through time albeit at a slower pace.

But even before we heard about Hybrids, we knew that fully electric vehicles were possible. GM/Saturn created their EV1 model following a new law in California that forced manufacturers to build a certain percentage of alternative fuel vehicles, but after 3 year rent contracts they were promptly taken back from the owners and destroyed - you see, the law had been reverted during that 3 year period.

I won't go into conspiracy theories that are self-evident, but my point is that Electrics can be as powerful and fun to drive as gas-powered cars - minus the pollution, noise and trips to the gas station. Some companies understood this and have created high quality vehicle lines such as the Tesla Roadster and the Fisker Karma, of which we hope the technological improvements will trickle down to the middle-class vehicles.

So with all this, what is preventing people from switching over completely to Electrics? There is of course a certain amount of disinformation caused as much by ignorance than propaganda by petrol lobbyists. They say that electric vehicles are "not as stable", "cost too much" and will leave you "stuck on the side of the road with a dead battery, looking for a power outlet".

It is true that battery vehicles are currently not as convenient as the gas cars in some respects. But let's take as an example a home-made solution. One very interesting young man in Montreal has decided to start his own company, purchasing 2004 Mazda3 cars with high mileage on the engine, and converting them to fully electric cars. Voitures Electriques du Quebec (the newly founded company) does not use high-end lithium batteries, experimental engines or expensive materials - everything he installs in the car is simple, and effective.

At an approximate retail of $25,000 the car is not so expensive in comparison to a gas car, and the savings it will bring quickly offset the costs. The car can easily hold its end cruising down the highway (120kph according to his website, however the owner admits speeds of up to 140kph on highways), and with a 100 kilometers autonomy, it's quite enough for 95% of the population.

Yes, it takes 12 hours to charge, but the simple act of going home and plugging in a car is not so foreign to drivers, at least not here in the cold canadian winters. It's a simple matter of extending the reflex to the summer days. And how much does it cost? About $1.50 to fully charge the batteries.

Quickly, that's about equivalent to purchasing 1L of gas (evidently this is fluctuating), so you can roughly estimate that you will spend about 20% of your current gas budget on this car - and this calculation is based on the most economical cars out there like the Smart and Prius. If you compare to the all-american-favorite the Hummer, you're actually talking 5% of your gas budget for the same mileage! This is excluding car insurance savings (no gas tank = safer = cheaper) as well as maintenance (no oil changes on an electric) and repairs.

Needless to say I am very interested in getting one of those babies for myself (the converted Mazda3, not the hummer!) and it will be my next car purchase. While I am preparing the budget for it, I will be watching VEQ grow and will be watching for results after a winter of use on the car.

What it feels like to realize you live in a Godless World.

I had never really realized, until just a month ago, that I was an atheist. I had heard the term before, and I knew what it meant, but I never really stopped to ask myself if I really believed in God or not - which I guess is probably I sign that I didn't in the first place. I thought about my "religion" a lot in the past few years, trying to figure out where I fit. Mostly if someone asked me what religion I was, I would answer "technically Christian, but I have my own view of the universe", which meant that my philosophy was my own, or what I had gathered and thought was the most valid.

But to be honest, I very regularly challenge my own views, and I recently had the chance to do so with a book. My girlfriend is an atheist herself, and I had not even really taken attention to this fact until she purchased a book online, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. This book was, without going as far as saying a revelation, at least an eye opener. What did Richard Dawkins do? In his book, the only thing that really caught my attention was the fact that, on the contrary of what we are lead to believe, there is such a thing as saying "I renounce my religion" or "I change my religion". Richard Dawkins told me it was OK to become an atheist, and I heard him.

But since I'm now a self-avowed atheist, I have to face a fact that probably is the show-stopper for most people who would like to renounce on their own religion, whatever it may be: How can I continue living if there is no God, no heaven, where I know that when I die I just cease to exist and I do not continue my existence in any way, shape or form, where there is seemingly no point to my insignificant life?

First, I considered that if there is no heaven, there's no hell either. There is no purgatory, eternal damnation, demons, there is no evil forces (or good forces) at work in the world other than what we create for ourselves. There is no God, meaning no one to strike me down with thunder if he doesn't like me, and the only authority that is over me is Laws. The laws of gravity, the laws of nature, and the laws of humans.

I find that oddly, I feel no sense of loss from a lack of God, even if he is supposed to be the most powerful and important being in the universe. I still have my life to look forward to, and on the contrary I feel like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders - I can stop looking for some "greater truth" or the "meaning" of my life as given to me before I was born - I have my own dreams to attain, that's it.

What about morality, what I see as good or bad, does that change? Well my morality didn't come from religion in the first place, it came from my family, my friends, my experiences in life, my knowledge and interpretation of laws, and a lot from common sense. "Don't do unto others what you would not have done unto yourself" (or however it's said in the bible) didn't have to be said by Jesus to be truth and morality - it's just logical.

And if my morality had come from my religion and from the bible... well just read The God Delusion and you'll see what that really means. In terms of morality, the bible is just about the worst place you can look, it's values of 2000 years old do not fit in today's world. In this blog, which I created specifically as a discussion place about what it means to be an atheist, what that implies, and the journey through life as an atheist, I will post things that I read about religion and just how impossibly useless it is, by giving examples of bible quotes, journal and web articles, videos and such.

I have created a new blog to talk about this, as well as potentially other subjects of interest, called The Atheist's Blog. Of course I am not "the" atheist, just one of many...

Uncensored Review of Lunar: Dragon Song

I will not be mincing words or hiding my frustration. I'll admit this review is purely a bashing of the game, that I am biased in my opinion, whatever makes you happy. But hey, this is my blog and I can do whatever I want with it. Including vent my frustrations about a crappy game.

So I waltzed in my local EB Games looking for a bargain, and I though I found one. Lunar: Dragon Song, a game translated and distributed by Ubisoft, for a meagre $15 (used with box, manuals, the works). If I could turn back time, I'd have kept my cash and bought a ticket to see a drunken homeless sleep - it would probably have been more entertaining.

Now comes the bashing. Lunar DS (notice the initials - L.A.M.E.) is a piece of shit game that has to be the worse RPG ever created. It's about as fun to play as eating a llama's vomit, and probably looks even worse (no offence intended to all llama's out there). Within the first 15 minutes of playing, I was already starting to bitch at the game and thinking I had just wasted time and money I could have spent reading a book.

There are a number of things to bitch about this game, including but not limited to:

Gameplay:

1. Running (or dashing as the call it) drains your fucking HP. What kind of a fucking idiot thought with his half-assed logic that running hurts anyone? What did he think, "oh, we'll make the characters asthmatic, but they're actually couriers! How funny" ? WTF!
2. You cannot gain Items and Experience at the same time. Yes, you've heard me right. When running around (ouch, my feet hurt!) in monster area, you can select between "Combat Mode" where monsters give you items and reappear infinitely, or "Virtue Mode" where you are kind of sacrificing the monsters you fight to the Goddess Althena. The monsters do not reappear, and you obtain "Althena Conduct" points. So you're never actually gaining experience - you're just sacrificing living things (birds and bees and blobs and the likes) to your goddess so she makes you stronger.
3. Besides that, items you get from monsters are totally useless - you're actually getting whiskers, feathers, tails, clay, rusty kettles (WTF?), etc. Ok, I'll admit that gaining money (Silver in this game, they just didn't want to do like everyone and call it gold) from monsters directly is kind of idiotic - but having to fight for hours to get enough crappy items to sell (less than 10 silvers per items at first) and buy heavily overpriced items and equipment is even more stupid - especially considering the fact that getting money from monsters has come to be expected from RPG games.
4. And as I just said, items are fucking expensive. For example, a basic armour in the second city is around 2400 silvers, which is way over any sort of budget from a beginner. Considering you get your ass kicked in battles, it's an understatement to say the game is unbalanced.
5. Speaking of battles, I could probably go on for hours about how fucking stupid the battle system is. Not only can you not gain items and XP at the same time, the manual states: "Note that you cannot select the monster to attack. Whatever monster is most appropriate will be attacked automatically". Who's the idiot that thought of this, so I can bash his head in with a clue-by-four? "Most appropriate"??? You mean the fact that I'm getting bashed on by monsters that do 15 dmg per hit and my character decides that he's going to attack the fly beside it that only does 1 dmg per hit is somehow logical behaviour? That any sort of battle strategy is missing from this game is supposed to be ok? Oh of course you can select which of your allies to heal with magic or on whom you're using an item... But you can't say which enemy to attack. Bravo, captain idiot!
6. You'll have plenty of time to constantly repeat to yourself how idiotic it is to have no control over the fighting, because the largest percentage of battles are done by selecting Auto Fight and holding the right shoulder button - which speeds up the battle by 3X. That is one of the only smart features of this game, and that's saying a lot.
7. Status effects are extremely idiotic. For example, being "poisoned" means that your HP will drain whenever you attack and enemy... But wait, if it was only that, it would be normal, logical, and predictable - nooooo. Some asshole decided that a) poison also drains MP, removing your ability to heal and cure yourself when you don't have any items left. b) poison does not affect you when outside of battle, so walking around doesn't draining HP or MP - that is unless you're dashing (ouch, a dust particle hit my hand!). c) poison (and possibly other status) is not cured when using an Althena Statue to heal yourself. So you need to use the statue, cure the poison, and then use the statue again. Thanks for wasting my time.
8. Every single use of the DS's capabilities by this game is token and can be done without. The mic is used only for running away from battles by blowing on it like an idiot. The dual-screen in battle doesn't show much except enemies in the air, which could have been on the lower screen. Outside of battle, it just displays your hp and mp, which is pretty useless - oh wait, I forgot you loose HP while running (ouch, a fly just hit my ear!), so maybe that's a good thing. The touch-screen gives you access to the menus which can all be brought up by pressing the appropriate button on the DS. You can also walk around using the arrows on the touch screen, instead of using the much more efficient D-pad. The wireless multiplayer game consists of scratching cards and hoping you can find a pair that's stronger than your opponent's.
9. From all that is said so far, one thing can be deduced: there is no balance in this game. To further this, the secondary "support" character, Lucia, cannot kill a single fucking monster in one shot until she is at least level 11 or 12, and even then it's by luck. She has a limited amount of MP and her spells take huge amounts of it - for example, having 46 MP when a "heal one" spell costs 10, and "heal all" costs 40 seriously sucks. And then you get poisoned, and by the end of the excruciatingly long battle, you're out of MP completely and can't heal yourself. Fucking shit.

Story:

1. After 4 hours of gameplay, I still haven't been told that I was expected to either save the world, save a damsel in distress, that a legend had to be fulfilled and it could only be me. That's a first in any RPG I've even played. Get with it, goddamnit!
2. The dialogues are boring and bland, and from what I've heard in reviews, this is Ubisoft's fault - they just botched the job, didn't create any new puns or witty comments that were lost in translation, and even made a bunch of typos that plague the game as well as the manual.
3. There are "side-missions" to do, given by the local Gad's Express. But they are based on obtaining an item (either a package, or sundries left by monsters) and delivering them to another city. But the higher paying ones will require dozens of a few types of items (some I haven't even seen yet, and that was a job from the first city) and it costs money to drop a job if you realize it's too hard. Making money from these jobs will require you to spend hours running around (ouch, my spleen!) like a headless turkey.

Graphics:

1. I'll concede that the character design in itself is nice. Within dialogues in the city, the faces of main characters as well as city dwellers are nicely rendered - or rather, they are nicely drawn, scanned and coloured. The cities are also cute, very old-school and rpg-like. Here ends the positive side of things.
2. Since the menus can be accessed by touch-screen, some idiot thought that everyone that would play this game is retarded, so they had to make every "hotspot" on the screen veeery obvious. So, they made icons that grow and shrink to a rhythm - but they didn't notice that the algorithm they're using sucks ass, and it looks as ugly as a baboon's shithole. So half of what you see on the screen makes you want to puke.
3. Those city dwellers you see in the game all look the same, since they took half a dozen artwork, changed the colour of the clothe and hair, and called that variety.

Sound:

1. Ok so the sound isn't actually bad, the sound effects are good, the music is entertaining - it's old-school, so the fact that it's not using the whole power of the DS is acceptable, in my opinion. You have a "sound test" option in the menu from the start so you can listen to the music and sound effect loops all you want. Pretty sweet.
2. They didn't try putting voices, which is thankful because they probably would have sucked like everything else.

Miscellaneous crap:

1. Out of 3 people I know that bought the game, none have played more than an hour of the game. They all, without exception, got pissed at it and stopped playing.
2. The game was repeatedly nominated as "worst game of" something (year, all time, etc) by magazines and websites all over the place. User ratings range from an atrocious 2.1 (which is still generous) to an idiotic 9.1 on gamespot, and that stupid asshole just sais "Hey, just forget about what everyone sais, buy the game anyway!". You know, like he was bought off body and soul by the makes or the game. Get a life, idiot.
3. Remember, this is bargain bin $15 (Canadian!).
4. If you're a Lunar series fan - run away as fast as you can. You will hate this game with a passion. The more you're a Lunar fanboy, the more you'll want to travel to Japan just to assassinate the idiots who made this game.
5. If you really want to waste your money, go buy a Sega Genesis and get Rolo to the rescue.

Well now. I guess I feel better. Now, to send an email to the makers of the game.....