Playing games has been around since the first caveman found a rock and started ttd width="289"hrowing it at other cavemen. What today is referred to as dodgeball use to be dodgerock, but what about less physical games that only require an Internet connection and fingers not too dirty from eating Fritos and Nerds.

World of Warcraft (1994) 11 million subscribers

The game revolves around having virtual players running around a virtual world with virtual friends that are virtually all as nerdy as you are. There are now websites (wow dk) that are made for buying and selling of World Of Warcraft virtual goods, for real money. Fun Fact 1: In June 2005 a four-month-old South Korean child had suffocated due to neglect by her parents, who were at a nearby café playing World of Warcraft. Fun Fact 2: The government of the People’s Republic of China introduced an online gaming restriction to people under 18-years-old limiting playing time to 3 hours. Retard Factor:

1

Habbo (2000) 8 million subscribers

Aimed at teenagers aged 13-17, Habbo features chat rooms rendered by isometric projection in the form of virtual hotel rooms. The service gains revenue from credits bought with real-life currency. Credits are used to buy products such as virtual furniture for the virtual hotel rooms and stickers for user pages. Fun Fact 1: 8 million users have made over 100 million players, meaning each user has on average 12 to 13 personalities. Fun Fact 2: The “Great Habbo Raid of ‘06″ occurred during 2006. In the raid (and most others), users signed up to the Habbo site dressed in avatars of an African American wearing a suit and Afro and blocked entry to the pool declaring that it was “closed due to AIDS“. Fun Fact 3: On 14 November 2007, a 17-year-old was arrested by police for allegedly stealing virtual furniture bought with real money worth up to $5,000. Retard Factor:

2

Runescape (2001) 15 million subscribers

Taking place in the fantasy-themed realm of Gielinor, which is divided into several different kingdoms, regions, and cities. Players can travel throughout Gielinor on foot, by using magical teleportation spells and devices, or mechanical means of transportation. Fun Fact 1: over 160 servers are used for RuneScape, with enough processing power to help cure AIDS and cancer, or allow nerds to live in a virtual wilderness. Fun Fact 2: complaints focus on incidents of scamming, general spamming, and arguing amongst players. Retard Factor:

3

Club Penguin (2006) 12 million subscribers

Using cartoon penguins as avatars, players waddle around, chat, play minigames and participate in other activities with one another in a snow-covered virtual world. At the point when they were purchased by Disney, Club Penguin had 12 million accounts, of which 700,000 were paid subscribers, and were generating $40 million in annual revenue. Fun Fact 1: Members have access to virtual Members-only parties hosted by Club Penguin. Fun Fact 2: criticism expressed by commentators is that the game encourages consumerism, which equates personal happiness with the purchase of material possessions (ya, because that wouldn’t happen without Club Penguin). Retard Factor:

4

Webkinz (2005) 1-2 million subscribers

Webkinz are stuffed animals that were originally released by the Ganz company on April 29, 2005. The toys are similar to many other small plush toys. However, each Webkinz toy has an attached tag with a unique “Secret Code” printed on it that allows access to the “Webkinz World” website. On Webkinz World, the Secret Code allows the user to own a virtual version of the pet for virtual interaction. Fun Fact 1: programming errors have caused many users to lose virtual items, Kinzcash and even pets and entire rooms. Fun Fact 2: Employees of stores that sell Webkinz products have expressed dismay over various aspects of the Webkinz craze. Many employees have complained about customers who frequently ask about when the new Webkinz styles will arrive, and are concerned by the number of Webkinz some parents purchase. Retard Factor:

5

Toontown (2003) 2-3 million subscribers

Created by The Walt Disney Company and billed as the first such game intended for kids and families. The game has an ESRB rating of E, for Cartoon Violence and Comic Mischief. In the game, each player takes the role of a Toon — a cartoon character based on an anthropomorphic animal: a dog, cat, duck, horse, mouse, rabbit, monkey, bear or pig. Players choose the species and customize the look of their toons when they first start the game. Fun Fact 1: Toontown contains no PVP battles, hence one player cannot “kill” another. Fun Fact 2: Most players use the built-in Toon name generator, which allows them to construct a name by clicking on one or more pre-approved “toony” words (”Super Pinky”, “Princess Rainbow Twinkletoon”, “Sir Funnymonkey”, etc). If a player chooses to submit a custom name, they must wait for someone at Disney to approve it. Custom names that are rejected will sometimes be approved if they are tried again. Names are not unique — multiple Toons can have the same name. Retard Factor:

6

Please poke out one of my eyes and take me to wherever the blind people live, I think that I would make a good king. I know that wherever I ruled, the word phishing would be spelled only with the letter F and whoever stole my money from Sterling Savings Bank would be put to death. The worst part is that I had saved all my recycled cans/bottles money in the local Sterling bank.

It was a typical Thursday morning today when I received my regular email and started going through it one message at a time. Of course, as a diligent email user I know the importance of using email for all forms of communication and that when I receive something in email, it’s meant to be acted upon. So when Ireceived my Sterling Savings Bank email, I realized that I needed to update my information immediately, as the email told me to.

Unfortunately the site was taken down, so even if you wanted to go to it and give them your information, the site doesn’t have any functioning parts let to it.

Thankfully there will be another phishing site coming up soon, as they are being created at a faster rate than they are being taken down.

In a couple of weeks you can get one of the coolest lego sets of all time - The 10188 Death Star. The round kit has three separate levels with 24 minifigures and sections representing the major parts of the Death Star from the original Star Wars movies (pre Jar-Jar).

Recreate the action and adventure of the Star Wars™ movies with the ultimate Death Star playset! This amazingly detailed battle station features an incredible array of minifigure-scale scenes, moving parts, characters and accessories from Episodes IV and VI on its multiple decks, including the Death Star control room, rotating turbolaser turrets, hangar bay with TIE Advanced starfighter, tractor beam controls, Emperor’s throne room, detention block, firing laser cannon, Imperial conference chamber, droid maintenance facility, and the powerful Death Star superlaser…plus much more! Swing across the chasm with Luke and Leia, face danger in the crushing trash compactor, and duel with Darth Vader for the fate of the galaxy!

Order One (for me please)

You are a nerd, live in your parent’s basement (or attic if you live in the Western United States), and you need to prove social stature to your nerd friends that you are better than they are. Well, you could either watch NUMB3RS and laugh along with me at their antiquated mathematical equations, or you could sell your life and soul.

How do you prove your nerd status level? Well, you can do the easy thing and battle friends in D&D or you could just play WOW (that’s World Of Warcraft for you non-nerds) or you could show up your friends by going ahead and deciding to sell WOW account online now!

That’s right, you could stop reading this fabulous review about a site that helps you sell your WOW account and just go online and sell it. The benefits besides selling your hard earned work for money, is you will be able to challenge your friends to a “my virtual life is worth more than your virtual life” contest.

I’m no where smart enough to spend hours online playing a game that will yield me less income than recycling cans and bottles I find in trash cans, but the good news is that you are that smart!

Sell your player and start making a new one. After another 6 months holed-up inside of mommy and daddy’s house you will earn yourself enough money to buy more Skittles and Coke.

Or if you are the last in your nerd-pack, you can buy characters off of the people that have spent their lifetimes making their player the ultimate. The advantage is that in many circles you can’t buy nerd status so easily, but here you can. You can buy and sell wow account and maybe even find other nerds to trade ideas with on this virtual wonderland that is World of Warcraft.

Unless you decided to walk outside and smell the air and see other human beings.

If you do decide to sell or buy a WOW character, leave a message here and your nerd-dentity will remain secret.

An anti-Israeli Facebook group is being eradicated by a secret group being called the JIDF (Jewish Internet Defense Force) being led by “John Cohen”. Of course, the JIDF hasn’t commented on whether they have any Israeli Special Forces training, but chances are Cohen peed himself at a Bar Mitzvah.

The JIDF took control of the “Israel is not a country! Delist it from Facebook as a country” Facebook group and is steadily deleting its members. Cohen’s anti-(anti-semitic) group and has since grown in popularity, with a following of over 60,000 members as of July 31, 2008.

Chances are Cohen’s gang of Jewish web ninjas won’t stop with the one group destruction and will move on to combat other anti-religious groups after Saturday (or whatever the Jewish day off is).

After reading the two paragraphs that were written on the anti-semite’s defaced group page, there’s no question that Cohen won the Jewish national Scrabble championship. Here’s a list of some of the words that Cohen shoehorned (17 pts) into a couple paragraphs, along with their Scrabble values, based on not being on any bonus spots:

antisemitic -15 pts; heartily - 14 pts; proliferating - 19 pts; abominable - 16 pts; propaganda - 16 pts; paralleled - 13 pts; provisions - 15 pts; ; ubiquitous - 21 pts; flourish - 14 pts; negligence - 14 pts; abdication - 15 pts; responsibility - 21 pts; legitimate - 13 pts; political - 13 pts; contextual - 19 pts; comparative - 20 pts; purposefully - 22 pts; disseminating - 17 pts; misinformation - 21 pts; delegitimize - 25 pts; repugnant - 12 pts

It’s obvious that Cohen really is much better at bored board games than the anti-semites in which he’s battling on Facebook.

Only the future will show if Cohen can remove the last 19,914 members of the original anti-semitic Facebook group and then move onto another group.

Cohen’s Facebook group

Karma is the concept of “action” or “deed” in Indian religions understood as that which causes the entire cycle of cause and effect described in some philosophies. You have all heard of someone that has done something good and mentioned karma coming back on them and rewarding them. After you read this, you will have a story about someone that karma hates –> me!

Friends and family that know me are aware that I’m not a super hero, but if I were my super power would be sarcasm. No, I’m not that good, but since it’s one of my more noticable traits it’s often looked upon as one of my strengths. Of course, this only helped me to find people that disliked me in school (they were stupid anyway, that’s why they were in school - which is where I was).

In order to get some good karma (just in case.. you never know when you may need it) I decided to buy a new computer for a family member. Since this someone that doesn’t necessarily need a high end computer system, I decided to avoid buying an Alienware computer and instead bought a Dell. Looking back, I should have bought some Taiwanese made HP or Gateway (are they still in business?).

Since I bought the computer, I was somehow volunteered to hook it up. I removed the old computer and figured that within minutes I would be finished… nope. Karma really dislikes me and everything I do. I must have been re-incarnated from an animal-abusing, child-hating, hippy-loving, homophobic or something else really bad. The computer powered on, but the hard disk was not seen by the BIOS. Here comes the wrath of good deads back upon me and up my ass sideways with a ping pong paddle.

I spent a few minutes diagnosing the problem. I opened the case removed the SATA cables from all three devices, two optical units and the HDD (hard disk drive). Then I removed the devices power cables and ran one of the power cables from the BIOS recognized optical unit to the HDD. Then placed one of the SATA cables from optical onto the HDD and into the SATA slot 0 on the motherboard. Still no recognition in the BIOS. I plugged everything back in, putting all connections back into the way the computer was sent and pulled out a SATA laptop HDD, plugging it into the desktop’s HDD cables. The BIOS was happy and wanted to boot into Windows. I’ve diagnosed the problem, and only spent like 4 minutes doing it. Now comes the pain…

I called Dell tech support (800-624-9896) and waited on hold for 19 minutes before getting a hold of someone I usually buy Slurpee’s from, I should have just headed down to 7/11 and picked up a Big Gulp while I was there. After being given a series of useless questions about power cables and USB devices, I got transferred to someone in the laptop support department (800-624-9897), who told me that I would need to speak with someone in the desktop support department. No sh*t Sherlock, thanks!

Of course I was disconnected, because the phone transferring for the Indians (dots, not feathers) is too difficult. I called back and waited on hold for another 13 minutes, which was quicker most likely due to the disconnecting phone callers. I started speaking with someone that was able to give me a case number which I would later be asked for, later, when I was disconnected again because manuals aren’t available in India and putting someone on hold is too hard for the computer support department in Nepal.

I called back, a third time, and waited about 9 minutes until my cell phone battery started giving up on me (Motorola V557 cell phones suck the ball-sweat between a marathon runners legs). It wouldn’t be until the next day that I got to speak with someone from “Dell”.

One Day Later

I’ve decided that getting Dell on the phone might not be enough, so I decided that I would call Dell and also communicate with someone online (http://www.dell.com/chat) and see if either one would maintain an open line of communication throughout the process. If both ways worked, I would be able to write a post about the double-teaming of Dell. You’ll notice that this post isn’t about that though.

I called Dell and started out with giving my case number. That didn’t do any good for the support tech that told me nothing was listed in my case except my name. Wonderful. After speaking for about 30 more seconds the rep on the phone asked my name. What? Didn’t he just tell me that my name was the only information on file? Great start Habib!

Simultaneously I started a chat session with Kanhaya_148312 (funny, they have so many Kanhaya’s that they give them numbers - India must not have many unique names available, though I’ve heard a comedian mention that in order spell the name of an Indian you would need to periodic chart of elements to show (the sign of boron).

Well.. as I’m writing this post I realize that it’s about to be as long as my support time from Dell so I’m going to start shortening it from here.

Phone support asked me to do crazy things with the computer (thankfully I have no shame and felt lonely), including unplugging all cables externally and holding the power button down for 30 seconds. Eventually (after about 30 minutes of ridiculous and time wasting steps and lots of hold times) phone support came through the victor, as they were going to send a replacement hard disk!

As for the chat support.. it ended like my first phone calls. I was hung up on through chat. Here’s the chat log for those of you interested though, it ended with me being hung up on through chat.. I’m telling you, karma just isn’t something I think that I’ll be worrying about anymore.

7:02:07 AM System You are now being connected to an agent. Thank you for using Dell Chat

7:02:07 AM System Connected with Kanhaya_148312 : 

7:02:07 AM Kanhaya_148312 : Thank you for contacting Dell Technical Chat Support. My name is Kanhaya and my rep ID number is 148312. How may I assist you?

7:02:29 AM Michael : I bought a new computer. The hard dik is not recognized.

7:03:00 AM Kanhaya_148312 : Michael, I apolozise for the inconvenience caused to you.

7:03:35 AM Michael : The computer is an Inspiron 530.
7:03:52 AM Kanhaya_148312 : I understand your concern and I will personally attend to the issue. Please give me 2 to 3 minutes to pull up your account information.

7:04:17 AM Michael : case # *** *** 051
7:04:37 AM Michael : I’ve been somehow disconnected like 3 times from support over the last 12hours.

7:05:07 AM Kanhaya_148312 : I apolozise for the disconnects and inconvenience caused to you.

7:05:12 AM Kanhaya_148312 : As per our records you are using an Inspiron D 530 with Windows VISTA HOME PREM Edition installed on it. Is that correct?

7:05:37 AM Michael : I don’t know what OS is installed on the hard disk. The computer won’t boot into Windows. It’s suppose to have that OS though.

7:05:57 AM Kanhaya_148312 : How long have you been facing this issue?

7:06:15 AM Michael : The problem has been happening since last night when I unboxed it. Besides that it’s been great.
7:06:32 AM Kanhaya_148312 : I see.

7:06:57 AM Kanhaya_148312 : Michael, are you near to the system with which you are facing the issue?

7:07:16 AM Michael : I have the system here.
7:07:46 AM Michael : When I turn on the computer is shows “No boot device available, press Enter key to retry”

7:08:12 AM Kanhaya_148312 : Michael, please do not worry, we will perform some steps and we will surely fix the issue.

7:10:03 AM Kanhaya_148312 : Michael, please restart the system and press F2 key as the system is powering on.

7:10:31 AM Michael : Alright, I’m in the BIOS.

7:11:42 AM Kanhaya_148312 : Please let me know if you see a hard drive detected there.

7:12:14 AM Michael : There are no hard disks detected.

7:12:29 AM Kanhaya_148312 : I see.

7:13:10 AM Kanhaya_148312 : Michael, you will need to check the power connections of the hard drive with the system.

7:13:53 AM Kanhaya_148312 : You will need to remove the system cover and reseat the cables attached to the hard drive.

7:13:58 AM Kanhaya_148312 : I will provide you with the link to do that.

7:15:38 AM Kanhaya_148312 : http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/inspd530/EN/OM/parts.htm#wp1508953

7:16:23 AM Kanhaya_148312 : Please open this link to remove the system cover.

7:16:53 AM Michael : I have unplugged the cables and plugged them back in.

7:17:11 AM Michael : I restarted the computer, the BIOS is not showing a HDD (hard disk drive).

7:17:12 AM Kanhaya_148312 : Great.

7:17:35 AM Kanhaya_148312 : Are you able to see the CD drive there?

7:18:01 AM Michael : I AM . Both CD drives are present (CD-RW and DVD-RW).

7:18:06 AM Michael : I’ve already attempted to switch SATA positions of the CD-ROM and the HDD, it did not work.

7:18:23 AM Kanhaya_148312 : I see.

7:18:31 AM Michael : I’ve also tried powering the HDD with the power cable from the CD-ROM, it did not work.

7:19:04 AM Michael : I then took the data cable from the CD-ROM and used that cable instead, that did not make a difference.

7:20:18 AM Kanhaya_148312 : I see.

7:20:33 AM Kanhaya_148312 : Michael : , we will need to replace the hard drive.

7:21:03 AM Kanhaya_148312 : May I know the address where you want me to send the hard drive?

7:21:56 AM Michael : (address removed to save me from getting more death threats in person)

7:22:31 AM Michael : When you send the new HDD, will it be pre-installed with whatever s/w was suppose to be installed upon this HDD?
7:22:43 AM Kanhaya_148312 : Yes, that is correct.

7:23:15 AM Kanhaya_148312 : may I send the service technician to replace the hard drive or can you do it yourself?
7:23:47 AM Michael : Whichever is easier for Dell. I’m fully capable of replacing the HDD myself.
7:24:43 AM Kanhaya_148312 : Michael, may I send the service technician to replace the hard drive or can you do it yourself
7:24:57 AM Michael : Umm.. Whichever is easier for Dell. I’m fully capable of replacing the HDD myself.
7:25:49 AM Kanhaya_148312 : Michael, I will send the service technician to your place to replace the hard drive for you.
7:26:10 AM Kanhaya_148312 : May I have the best number where the service technician can contact you?
7:27:33 AM Michael : If you send the hard disk, I can replace it myself. If you would rather have a technician do it, that’s fine with me but not necessary.
7:28:27 AM Michael : Replacing the HDD would only take a few minutes, seems unnecessary to have someone else do it.
7:28:58 AM Kanhaya_148312 : Al right, then I will send the hard drive to you and you will need to replace it yourself.
7:29:06 AM Michael : Understood.
7:29:28 AM Michael : Will you be including the means for me to return the failed HDD (like a return shipping sticker)?
7:29:29 AM Kanhaya_148312 : Kindly stay online for 2-3 minutes while I provide you the dispatch number for future reference.
7:29:42 AM Michael : ok
7:30:42 AM System The session has ended!

Sure when that old guy comes on TV late at night and asks you to feed starving children somewhere maybe it should take into account there are starving cannibals in the world. You might wonder while watching a zombie movie or just staring at yourself in the mirror how many cannibals could I feed - well wonder no more…

I could feed 18 cannibals - how many could you feed?

Cannibal feeding score

No word on how long you could feed them, I think at 255 pounds I could feed more than 18 in one sitting, maybe that is for a week (not sure how long it takes human to go bad).

thoughts.com wants you to share your thoughts. Seems pretty inviting. The idea of the site starts out like blogger.com or typepad.com or wordpress.org, but separates itself from other blogging sites with one sentence which almost seems obscured in the signup process, “When you sign up for a free blog and start posting, you will have an instant audience”. I’m now paying attention.

When someone starts blogging, they do it for a couple reasons. One of the main reasons is so that other people will read their blog. Now with a site like “Retard Zone” we didn’t expect people to swarm to our site by the John Chow dot com full with their Zac Johnson in their hands waiting to read. Sometimes we even have to defend our website name, as people don’t really understand what “Retard” means. With the simple domain name of thoughts.com there is no question what the site contains, but just how limiting the thoughts might be.

When I went to the site I was presented with an initial layout which showed me a nice three column page. The column on the left was Recent Blog Posts, the center column was News from 5 categories (Top News, Life, Business, Sports, Politics), and the right column was a Member Log In along with a quick note about their previous vacation winners.

The nice part of the center column would be that it rotates between the 5 categories, showing a title of the top news stories with the date and time of the story, along with a “More” area with 5 more stories for each of the showing categories. This is a quick but brilliant use of AJAX.

Because thoughts.com allows everyday people to sign up, and as of yesterday I’m an everyday person, I signed up.

I started up my Dumbdows Windows laptop and let IE take me to thoughts.com, but soon learned that IE isn’t what makes people have thoughts:

the error comes from the following code: window.onload=startClock(’14,11,10,8,7′);

Time for me to go with Mozilla, the other IE.

The page seemed pretty big initially, especially for my laptop. The homepage of thoughts.com is an impressive 954 pixels wide and 1,220 pixels long. Not that I wouldn’t enjoy the scrolling benefits of fighting carpal tunnel more, but isn’t there something about having a site that is viewable without having to go full screen? According to some statistical tracking site, the most common resolution setting for monitors is 1,024 x 768. And there’s little likelihood that people run their browser in full screen mode.

Well, I never have enough blogs, so my first step here is to set up a blog and post something and wait for the hordes to read it.

The second horizontal bar on the page, second link in, is the “Free Blog” link. Of course, being a Jew (determined by Halakha), anything that has the word free earns at least one click from me. The signup process should be a quick and painless one, as getting people signed up is the purpose of the signup process. I was presented with a couple of questions to answer, which took little time (even for a Retard like me).

After the signup was completed, I had the option to upload a picture, which I did. There was another captcha for uploading an image, even though I just filled in the captcha for signing up. Perhaps there’s a discount on using captcha multiple times?

After I had my new official thoughts.com account, I was given the opportunity to invite friends. Of course, I don’t have any friends, but being given the option to invite them was very nice. There is something that MySpace, Facebook, and other sites have started doing with great success, and that’s having horribly intrusive programs run through your Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, and even Outlook email accounts in order to find other friends of yours that are already members. If they aren’t, these sites give you the chance to harass them and invite them to come running and join with you. Perhaps thoughts.com should look into being more intrusive.

I checked my account information page, there were a few things that required me to fill out more info about (gender, relationship, sexual orientation, religion, status) and then I got to see my first glimpse of pain from thoughts.com, it came when I saw their editor. They were using the “fckeditor”. Pain. They could have at least enabled some basic features of the editor, like allowing code view or just allowing upload options for GIF or PNG files:

It was time to make a blog post on my newly created account. It was pretty easy and painless (once I converted the PNG images to JPG to work with the editor), and within minutes I had my first blog post created. Now it was just a matter of time until the instant audience descended upon me.

Just curious to see what other people might have accounts on thoughts.com, I performed a search for the name trader and found that there were two pages of users listed.. but something seemed wrong with many of the listed users… I just didn’t know that people in the witness protection program were using thoughts.com too:

While waiting for the hordes, I took another minute and visited the forums.

Interesting that this site had blog posting, forums, current news, and probably more things which I had not yet begun to discover. The HTML description of thoughts.com is: Create a Free Blog or personal online journal at Thoughts.com. Upload photos, videos, podcasts, chat in the community forums and bookmark the latest news. Thoughts.com allows you to decide for each blog post if you want it to be public, private, or only viewable by your friends and family. Free unlimited bandwidth. Wow.. that’s a lot. On to the more fun parts, I did learn that blog sites can be customized, as missmarie had done.

It only took a couple days to pass before I had 14 visitors to my blog post, which I had not previously advertised or told others about in any way. This is pretty good, since I usually have to spam at least 5,000 people to get one person to read my ramblings (thanks again mom).

I’m pretty sure that if I didn’t have a Retard place as a home like I do now, I would be over at thoughts.com entertaining the people that were willing to come visit my ramblings while I was blogging like the Retard that I am.

One of the coolest shows on TV is Mythbusters and in one of the cooler things they did was cut down a tree with a mini gun. Sure non-retarded people use an ax or a chainsaw but when you have a machine gun that fires thousands of rounds a minute why waste the effort.

The show if you haven’t seen it tries to recreate urban myths and see if they are accurate or not, although I’m not sure who didn’t believe this was possible.

It is possible to cut down a tree with a machine gun.

confirmed

The build team obtained large pine tree trunks and set them up in the Mojave Desert. The trees were shot at using a Thompson submachine gun and a M249 SAW, but they remained standing. The .45 bullets were too slow and inaccurate, and the 5.56mm NATO rounds didn’t cause enough damage to fell the tree. However, when Kari used a M134D minigun that fired 7.62mm NATO at 50 rounds per second, the pine trunk fell down within a minute. A much denser mesquite tree was also cut in short order.

Mythbusters official site

I realize that nearly everyone in this world wants to make money. I also know that most people are willing to cheat and lie and scam for money, which is their right… usually. But when something comes across my email in order to phish or attempt to scam, things get annoying. So, now I’m annoyed.

Because some of my email addresses have been around for many years, I get to sift through pounds and pounds of email. Within the last couple weeks, I’ve received the same message on multiple email accounts, questions about it from friends, and today a question about it from family. Time to me to warn people about the phishing site “paypal-secure-login.com” before anyone gets scammed.

I went to the site and noticed that it took a long time to load. I pinged the domain name in order to find out what IP address the server responds with, which is 212.199.95.108. I went to Arin and put in the IP address. The result made sense for the website being slow to load, it’s hosted in Amsterdam. The website connection seems slow because chances are the servers are all high.

Looking at the website, it doesn’t look too dissimilar from the real Paypal login site.

Let’s take a quick look at the site and compare it to the real Paypal site though, only we won’t just look at it quickly, we’ll compare it more closely.

The main horizontal link structure looks the same. It even has the same links. Of course, this is pretty smart that most phishing sites don’t take the time to replicate (or steal), because the don’t want you to leave their site. This site takes the chance of you leaving, but gives you a realistic opportunity while you are on the page. We’ll get to the different color address bars in a minutes.

There is definitely something not matching when you look at the bottom status bar, that would be the JavaScript error. Since not all browsers show the status bar (in IE 7 it needs to be enabled for viewing) this is something that might go undetected. Something you can see more obviously in a side-by-side comparison is the lock picture next to the “Account login” words. Though this detail is so minute that it might be missed by even daily Paypal visitors.

The URL looks pretty legit, it has the word “paypal” in it. Notice that it’s not a secure login though. SSL is something that phishing sites don’t attempting to fake (though it is easy to generate SSL certificates). The reason is that phishing sites aren’t trying to get you or me, they are trying to get people not paying attention or just ignorant. The links on both sites are almost entirely the same… including the “Log In” link.

One click on the SSL certificate shows that there the real Paypal site has a certificate from one of the trusted certificate issuers on the Internet.

Small differences continue, this time with the arrow icon next to the language drop down. Both drop down menus have the same options. Without that SSL cert, this looks really realistic.

Sloppiness apparently occurred when the new bottom horizontal links menu was created. Those bottom window links don’t exist on the real Paypal site.
Actually, the only non-Paypal link on the fake-Paypal site was for the “Developers” link. The link doesn’t go anywhere, it just errors out on the fake site, but it’s still one of very few errors on this copy-site.

This is a really good fake phishing site, and should be taken down immediately. Chances are the Amsterdamians are too high to react to requests for the site to be taken down.

If you have any questions about potential phishing sites, please let us know.