At first I thought what a load of bullshit! Nobody can simply do that and get away with it, right? WRONG! They are ruthless. Here is what happened to us.

We got a pamphlet thing with our Multichoice magazine about last year some time. This pamphlet said you can get one of those crappy blow-up mattresses for free if you order it. Since we do get visitors often and often do need these kind of things, my wife decided to go for it. At the same time, she saw they advertised some ceramic baking dishes and ordered that, which she paid for by credit card.

Last week, out of the blue, her credit card gets debited for R348.95 by Homemark. No explanation. No details whatsoever. Nothing. Now, I’m not one to jump to conclusions, so we tried to contact them and find out whether someone used our card fraudulently. Someone could have skimmed her card, as it so often does happen, and used it. HAH! We might as well have phoned Telkom. It is of NO use trying to figure out what happened.

We had to phone the bank, cancel the card and get a new card issued. What a bloody mission. We were requested by the bank to lay a charge of fraud with our bank, so it does sound that this happens quite frequently. Oh well, I’m not very optimistic that anything concrete will come from all this, so here is some sound advice:

DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES DEAL WITH HOMEMARK

Simple advice that will go a long way and save you plenty of trouble.

A very good day to you Stii Pretorius,

We have received your response to our advertisement, but now need you to please forward the following documents to us, via fax: 0866523502

ID document
CV
Reference letters (if you have)
Certificates (if applicable)

Please try your best to forward these documents to our fax number as soon as possible.
We cannot process your application without these documents.

Kind Regards

Liane
Pre-Screening
Recruitment Dept.
Rebels Personnel

As with Aggies Recruitment Services, it is sent from a domain called rebels.com which is co-incidentally the same name as the supposedly recruiter Rebels Personnel. If you visit rebels.com, you get to exactly the same free email account service as if you would visit aggies.com.

I’ve sent my post yesterday to Bestjobs, and to date heard nothing from them.

It worked! Only, not quite as expected… Every dealer has the name:

Hacked by m0sted and DrakuLa İsrael and usa stop No War

Here is a screen shot:

I wanted to notify Nissan, but oddly enough, the only contact details for Nissan was the dealers. Which are coincidentally all called m0sted and DrakuLa. Hmmm. They better do something as I have a strong suspicion that this might only be the beginning of something worse to come. Oh, and Nissan, at least put some contact form or head office phone number or email address on your site so we can notify you in cases like these.

What was even more weird was that when I went to whois.co.za to find some form of contact, I saw that the technical contact was Netmaster from Infovan. Cool, let me go to www.infovan.co.za. ACK! This is what’s on the Infovan site… very strange…

Anyways, all good, emailed the addresses found on whois.co.za and if they have not responded by tomorrow I’ll give them a tinkle.

If you want to check for yourself, here is what you do:

1. Go to: http://www.nissan.co.za/buying_dealers.asp
2. in the left hand column, don’t make any selections or enter any criteria
3. hit enter…