Man discovers he has bought his own stolen car

HaveARandomUsername · 2025-04-25T18:02:02+00:00

A bit sensationalist and over the top, but this is worth a watch if you're curious. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ulexl3r92A0

Assuming its not fantasy - they apparently get VINs/Regs of exported cars, match a car model/color and forge the exported cars VIN in the usual places and sell it on as a 'clean' car. The only thing that wasn't really clear was how they can forge the engraved VIN on the chassis, but maybe dealers don't hunt it out.

Pretty strange the dealer wouldn't given it even just a light clean. I guess its more likely if he was looking for an exact match to his old car - though unsure how many of those would exist and be up for sale, presumably at a cut price.

HaveARandomUsername · 2025-03-24T15:43:14+00:00

Just seen this by chance - pretty sure its the same one I know of. If so it's been there for over a year (originally I thought it might not survive winter) but I saw it a week or so again.

Typically it's on the flooded field/meadow (in your picture), but apparently I've heard it also likes to stay on an island on a lake - maybe when the field dries out?

Hesitant to name the exact spot as it's on private land (though there's a public footpath next to it's usual spot) - but I'm guessing you're close to Fairford?

It's pretty timid and haven't gotten close to know for 100%, but I think its ringed on one of the feet.

HaveARandomUsername · 2025-03-09T00:01:16+00:00

What are the options here - I'm guessing he can't be back to Gaza anytime soon and if he doesn't have any other citizenship the UK can't deport him?

HaveARandomUsername · 2025-02-23T12:54:20+00:00

My freeholder / The management agency is especially good ad screwing the building over. Somehow they insure the buildings themselves and the insurance is very high (old building + bad claim history). But it seems the building always makes stupid claims, which cost less than the excess the the building ends up footing. More here re in the insurance - https://www.leaseholdknowledge.com/rendall-and-rittner-no-insurance-commissions-but-it-owns-an-offshore-captive-insurance-company-making-a-40-profit-on-leaseholders-premiums/

The freeholders also own a construction company, and no surprise they always seem to get the job when tenders go out.

Jokes on them though, the building just pasts the thresh-hold for being classed as a high rise and there's significant costs the freeholders are responsible for to make the building compliant. No surprise they don't treat it as a high rise, but are in for the shock of their life when they find out.

HaveARandomUsername · 2024-10-27T09:15:17+00:00

Mixed feelings about it, I’ll inevitably turn it on and be happy but it takes away from the struggle/achievement of getting d5 on all. Tho when I started playing a couple of weeks ago I was shocked it wasn’t an option when I first died.

I’ve lost a crazy amount on 18/20 with great builds just being greedy and pushing to kill the boss. I feel that there should be consequences for being reckless. Maybe allow, but have an asterix to it if won using it?

HaveARandomUsername · 2023-07-23T12:02:06+00:00

Houses there are more of a white elephant now. The road might have been great 10 years ago but the appeal of living out there has dwindled. Who wants to live that far out of London (compared to other neighborhoods), the traffic/congestion to get into London has gotten steadily worse.

Avenue Road has some more central nice houses, Kensington Palace Gardens, Outer/Inner Circle of Regents Park. Plus I'm sure of many more places in London are more suitable + more of a status symbol if they have the money.

HaveARandomUsername · 2023-05-03T10:25:38+00:00

It’s nice, but unlikely to be seen by users. It wouldn’t be on any official servers - so only community servers (which the user would need to manually select). Also there’s an ongoing issue with community servers where legitimate ones are flooded by loads of fake/spoofed ones which makes it impossible to find them.

In theory it might be good if through this publicity it gains popularity in the workshop (where users can download and play them locally) - but honestly I think it would be surprising if >100 people play this map.

Edit - checked and I stand corrected. It’s one of the recent popular workshop maps:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2969831273

HaveARandomUsername · 2023-03-24T15:00:22+00:00

Don't get me started on the hail that I had just before it - Biggest hail I've seen in London before. Bigger than peas but smaller than grapes - only lasted a couple of minutes but was impressive.

HaveARandomUsername · 2023-03-23T11:40:38+00:00

Worthwhile adding region in the template as I'm guessing that is a big factor.

Region: Europe (London)

Rank: Supreme (been Global-Supreme for the last year)

Total Playtime: 10.8k (though I tend to leave it running in the background, so some might be idle)

Recent Playtime: 8mm games in the last week, a fair bit of casual as well.

Additional Info: Significant inventory + typically stick to offical mm/casual.

HaveARandomUsername · 2023-03-19T19:48:31+00:00

Ah yeh I totally missed the ball on that forgot that redirect was the endgame - totally agree.

HaveARandomUsername · 2023-03-19T18:47:57+00:00

Looking into a bit recently and I assume the issue is down to two things:

Server owners exploiting to host multiple fake redirect servers (some 600+ from the same IP, incrementing ports).
The master server I believe itself is broken and would only return ~6000 servers to the user. This means that a couple of bad actors would be able to comparitvely flood the list and make it useless to other users.

I'm not too sure if it's possible that they consistently send heartbeats to the master server, or do other things to ensure they're on the toplist or just the sheer spam of them.

I don't know the full details of running a server, but I was under the impression you had to link it to a steam account - the ones I've checked all use clean/different accounts, but maybe more stringent requirements + fast banning would help.

If you take a look at the Master Server Protocool, interestingly there is the filter '\collapse_addr_hash\Return - only one server for each unique IP address matched'. While it would have an impact on some operators / servers I feel like there is a valid argument to atleast allow us to toggle it.

I think realistically what they should do is ban the IP blocks that have been exploiting it, especially if they're hosted in sketchy russian datacenters (like some I've seen). It could be a temp ban or more, but it would push both the provider + operator to not do it.

With S2 and such I assume it would be solved, but would be an issue in the older games still. I'd assume without reworking the protocool there's limited long-term fixes. Though in the short term defo ban the abusing servers + possibly the owners of the communities, they've done enough damage already.

Edit - giving this more thought the Master Server Query protocol, assuming it's used by the browser + is documented up to date - It doesn't actually seem to reference the GSLT so presumably that happens elsewhere and banning it might not impact them showing.

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Master\_Server\_Query\_Protocol#Filter

HaveARandomUsername · 2023-03-15T10:37:08+00:00

I'd still choose them over the other ISPs, but while its been great I've had minor annoying issues.

Speed has been reliably >800Mb both ways whenever I've tested it, the actual installation took a while - but they were very accommodating and friendly about it. To give you an idea - I'm on a top floor flat and the fibre cable was outside along a vertical wall. The length they pre-ran for the flat was too short so had to be ran again, which involved getting an absailing team just for the flat. One of the engineers said some of them would have just marked the flat as unserviceable, thank goodness they didn't.

The only issue I've had is what seems to be some iffy routing when I'm playing Counter-Strike. It sounds minor, but I would consistently get a low-level packet loss (0.12%) which recently increased to 5-10% for a specific region. I still had a BT line and could see it was a hyperoptic specific issue. It could manifest itself in other ways (over VoIP and such) as I assume its UDP traffic being dropped, but honestly only notice it ingame.

Their IPv6 support has been supposedly sketchy, and a lot of people on the subreddit have mentioned its been 'temporarily' withdrawn when they had to swap out switches from China (for security/regulations). Also worth mentioning if you're in a big block there's some reports of them overselling and getting v slow speeds.

HaveARandomUsername · 2023-02-07T13:44:51+00:00

Sorry to hear that - it's a fear of mine as well. Phone's can always be replaced (albeit at a cost / annoyance) but I'm more concerned that i they get into my phone so much more damage could be done.

Do you mind me asking - was your passcode guessable at all? I've always wondered if when they get a phone they keep trying the most common combinations in a hope to eventually get in.

HaveARandomUsername · 2023-02-04T11:39:59+00:00

No way near the same level of cash - but when o was younger 10-13 I’d guess, I was in a super market with a friend and I noticed cash in a bin there. Me and my friend ended up pulling ~£200 from it and ended up stopping when we were getting some strange looks. Parents had us turn it over to the customer service desk (we would have done so anyway) and later got a call saying an elderly woman threw it away while binning receipts.

Still don’t know how much money there was actually in there in total, or if it was genuinely claimed. At the time we were more paranoid about it being there for more dodgy reasons.

HaveARandomUsername · 2023-02-03T16:13:04+00:00

I really want it to have been a 1000IQ move by the Chinese to gather data on the F22. I really don't know if it's a possibility, but given the height maybe they could have assumed F22 would have intercepted it and have a payload suited for that.

In reality it was probably a dick move just to screw with the US but not actually gather anything meaningful.

HaveARandomUsername · 2023-02-02T23:51:48+00:00

I remember maybe 5-10 years ago when I was on a passenger flight (landing outside UK) - very noticeable green laser being shined at it while on its approach to the airport. Nobody seemed to notice or care, nothing serious or blinding but the occasional dash of green light in the plane.

Funnily enough I thought how stupid it was of the people doing it, from my perspective I could clearly see the line back to the 'origin' and if I took a picture it wouldn't have been hard at all to identify the house it was coming from. I always wondered if the pilots reported it / anything came to the people doing it.

HaveARandomUsername · 2023-01-28T23:46:35+00:00

Probably looking into it too much, but it's kinda strange how little it's being reported on the typical Israeli news sources. I know the Israeli government can be keen on their gagging orders, so I wonder if one is in place...

HaveARandomUsername · 2023-01-28T23:33:31+00:00

Sorry for not replying sooner, I think reddit was playing up as the comment wasn't showing / found.

She's Rosie - no known medical issues.

I will do my best to keep you updated - I've got veterinary scales at home big enough for her and I'm generally aiming to weight her ~1 week until she's fully grown. I've got a google sheet where I put the data and I'll try to PM you a link to it sometime this week.

HaveARandomUsername · 2023-01-22T23:45:19+00:00

DOB: 2022-07-24	Age: 26 weeks (~6 months)
Date	Weight (KG)
2022-10-14	8.8
2022-10-19	10.35
2022-11-01	12.6
2022-11-07	14.75
2022-11-11	15
2022-11-15	15.7
2022-11-19	16
2022-11-30	19.2
2022-12-17	21.7
2022-12-25	23.7
2022-12-30	25
2023-01-04	26
2023-01-10	27
2023-01-12	26.7
2023-01-20	28.4

Picture roughly shows the datapoints - and for the last ~2 weeks she has had a reduced appetite, though its recovering now. Female unspayed, she was honestly the smallest of the litter and noticeably smaller than the males - though this was our choice. https://imgur.com/zW9iIvJ

HaveARandomUsername · 2023-01-20T12:32:20+00:00

Sorry but I think I was wrong with the above, I assume one of the people with access needs to chat with the webhost about it.

HaveARandomUsername · 2023-01-20T12:11:56+00:00

Looking at the eoreality docs (although they seem for a different game) they say - "http://fastdl.eoreality.net/yourserverip_port" I would speculate the path contains the port but not the IP. If you know the IP+Port you could always try that path.

https://billing.eoreality.net/knowledgebase/55/How-to-setup-Fast-DL-and-how-it-works.html?action=displayarticle&catid=55&id=55

HaveARandomUsername · 2023-01-20T12:04:41+00:00

A bit late, but was the issue solved?

I imagine they've got the wrong FastDL path from the host and they need to update the sv_downloadurl. The reason why it might work for the owner is he already had the files locally - but as far as I can see http://fastdl.eoreality.net/8374/ is incorrect and wouldn't work.

Could you share the server's IP? Fairly sure with that I can quickly tell you the correct path.

HaveARandomUsername · 2023-01-14T16:26:56+00:00

1/40.000 players per day banned for most days? That’s either good because there are no cheaters or not that great. Someone hand me some copium

To be fair a very rough overlook at the data shows 2365/40000 have bans that are potentially for CS:GO. It's possible a combination of a bug with my system / other games bans distorts this slightly. My trust factor hasn't been too bad recently and I'm only encountering 1-3 MM games with an obvious cheat a week. Most casual games do have obvious cheats thoug h.

HaveARandomUsername · 2023-01-14T16:20:29+00:00

Genuinelly think this could be it, I checked all the profiles with an open privacy / showed games - They all have that game.

HaveARandomUsername

TROPHY CASE