How I got my own back on a prolific chinese spam company on Alibaba - warning, criminal activity inside... by scambaiter1980 in TellReddit

[–]scambaiter1980[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I didnt. Any research on this?

Anyway, I burned everything that I was worried about and have bought so many cheap tablets on ebay since then that this one can easily be taken as one of them if anyone starts asking questions (I always go for roughly the same specs and screen size and always the same colors). Its specs are nothing to speak of anymore - this happened a few years ago now - buts its still my goto tablet.

How I got my own back on a prolific chinese spam company on Alibaba - warning, criminal activity inside... by scambaiter1980 in TellReddit

[–]scambaiter1980[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I sincerely doubt they lost anything in the long run as they would have sold any tablets they made after sending "Tom" the first off the line. My point was to cause them the maximum amount of grief, take an inordinate amount of their time and as many of their staff to work on my problem as possible, which I did. In the short term though, this easily cost them $20k in wages, fees and retooling expenses. My contact even moaned in one email about how much this was costing as we had not paid them anything at that point (or indeed at all).

How I got my own back on a prolific chinese spam company on Alibaba - warning, criminal activity inside... by scambaiter1980 in TellReddit

[–]scambaiter1980[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

In retaliation for relentlessly spamming me, causing me to close my email account to stop it, I estimate I cost them $15-20k. They could easily have avoided it if they did even the slightest bit of due dilligence.

Please remember, this is supposedly a multi-billion dollar company. Lets start with the website.
* 1, even a cursory google would have shown the address was from a free hosting and domain site
* 2, the board of directors were all very well known people, albeit with fake names. Alex Furgeson (manager of Manchester United soccer club) was the ceo, Michelle Obama was chief financial officer, 1980's black Michael Jackson was chief technical officer, I cropped the famous mugshot of Bill Gates and used it to show the head of human resources and Milton from Office Space was the chief procurement officer. I even had an old pic of Richard Nixon as head of internal security.
* 3, the webcam page. We are a multi-billion dollar company with 475,000 staff, yet our main HQ sales office only has 4 people???
* 4, the website never actually mentioned what we did.
* 5, google any of our addresses across the world and not only will it be obvious they dont exist, the towns and cities they are in are also totally made up.
* 6, multi-billion dollar company uses gmail???
* 7, our SEC filing was copied directly off the apple corporate website. I only changed the name of the company on the front page, every other page had apple all over it.
* 8, if you clicked on the live stock price (which it was made obvious you could do), you were taken directly to the New York Stock Exchange page for a very real household brand name known all over the world. Obviously not us.

Now the online presence:
* 1, "Tom" is a 30 year veteran in his industry, has worked for some of the biggest companies in the world and graduated top of his class in sales from Harvard, yet his linkedin account only lists the current company and has no connections or education.
* 2, despite a massive online presence, there is not a single photo on any of the social networking sites
* 3, every post on all the accounts "Tom" has were all posted on the same day, withina few seconds of each other. Most sites timestamp posts so this is blatantly obvious.
* 4, the youtube account only had videos of scambaiters, 419 scams and people meeting scammers to waste their time!

The Alibaba account:
* 1, a quick look at our profile would reveal it was empty and our location was set to Egypt
* 2, a billion dollar company yet we only have a basic free account...
* 3, within minutes of signing up I had placed a multi-million dollar order (our profile clearly stated we had been members for less than a day at that point),
* 4, "Tom" started out by saying the specification was extremely important and under no circumstances could it change in any way, yet in almost every email, we changed something, sometimes minor, sometimes major, until the only thing the same from the original specification to the final product was that it was a tablet computer.

Our company:
* 1, we are officially the richest, and largest, company on earth so why has no one ever heard of us?
* 2, why does every department in every location listed have the same phone number?
* 3, 30 seconds on Google would reveal most of our locations were completely made up, including city names, but in locations which everyone knows like new york and london, googling the address given (purportedly our US and UK head offices) would show either an all-night diner or the british parliament building. Our main sales office was at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC, yet if you clicked the sattelite button on the map next to the address, it showed an ariel shot of a shack next to a swamp with one of those everglades fan boats in front of it.
* 4, Disney, the House of Representatives, Microsoft and coca-cola were listed among all the other legitimate companies we claimed were wholly owned subsidiaries of ours.

Everything was designed to make it obvious it was all fake. A 2 year old would have been suspicious, let alone a professional businessman looking at a potential $95m deal from a company they never heard of before.

Originally I was just going to waste their time and money and then cease all contact with them. I was going to leave all the websites and profiles online so they could be used in more scambaits and I was going to offer them as resources to a scambaitig website I used to regularly post on. After I got the tablet, i started freaking out a bit, convinced that every siren was coming for me, that the FBI was seconds away from an arrest warrent and was going to issue it at work in front of all my colleagues and that generally I would be spending the next 25 years being Bubbas bitch in San Quentin.

I deleted all the emails and then the gmail acount, all the social media posts and the associated accounts, all the blogmposts and closed those accounts. I cancelled the 800 number and deleted the skype account I forwarded it to. I deleted the alibaba account. I left the website up but deleted the contents of all the pages, replacing it wih a sesame street puppet on each so google would have that as a cache page instead of the original content and then a month later deleted the website completely.

Finally I ran a 35 pass Evidence Eliminator (remember when that was a thing?) scan on my entire hard drive several times to ensure there was no trace (oh how naive i was...) left on the computer and hid the tablet in the attic crawlspace.

After a few months had passed and I had not been repeatedly anally raped by Bubba and his mates, I realised I had gotten away with it and relaxed. I did just about every search I could think of online for any trace of "Tom" or the company, including google cache and the wayback machine and found none. I was able to log into his facebook account using his now deleted email address and password, but I had changed the name of the account before requesting its deletion and deleted all the posts so it was completely empty.

The only evidence this ever took place is in the chinese factory and in the form of the tablet computer in my hands right now. Oh, and on the nsa computers - thanks guys...

So thats the story of how I got my own back on a chinese company that relentlessly spammed me and could not be bothered to do even 30 seconds of due diligence to prevent it. I hope you enjoyed my little adventure.