Vindale Research

I received this in my Spam box today. 

From: Vindale Research info@todayexpress.net

Subject: HELP WANTED - REVIEWERS NEEDED - GET UP TO $75 PER

Since I haven't heard from them before, I decided to see what's going-on and whether this is just another scam.

Well, they don't appear to be a deliberate fraud. But, the company's online reputation is rather tainted and I would advise against anyone signing-up for a membership.

First, I tried to do an IP trace of the email itself and discovered that the IP cannot be traced to its point of origin. Looks like someone is trying to hide.

Second, researching the company itself, I learned that their website can be found at vindale.com and their contact information is

Vindale Research
243 Fifth Avenue, Suite 541
New York, NY 10016
Telephone: 1-855-VINDALE (846-3253)
Fax: 1-866-841-3898

The given address does not appear to be their physical address, but seems to be a mailbox at the UPS Store there. So, the "suite number" is actually their mailbox number. So, if you ever wanted to have legal documents served on them for some reason, you'd be out of luck.

Vindale is making use of social networking sites and you can visit them on Facebook and Twitter.

Vindale Research is a subsidiary by SayForExample, Inc.which also is the parent company of Paid Samples (website PaidSamples.com is offline) Survey 4 Profit (website Survey4Profit.com) and is not accredited by the Better Business Bureau, though the BBB has a review of the company and has given them a C+ rating. I found it rather disturbing that there have so far been 22 complaints filed against SayForExample, Inc in the last year.

Nathanael "Nate" Ehrich is the Founder and CEO of SayForExamle, Inc.

Next, I Googled "Vindale Research" and found complaints against this company going back to 2008:

• Consumer Affairs Complaints & Reviews: Vindale Research
• Beware of Vindale Research Scam Paid Survey Site
• Is Vindale Research legit?
• Vindale Research Reviews: Legit or Scam?

However, a fairly balanced review that presents both the good and bad points of signing-up for Vindale Research can be found here. He did a particularly good job of examining how the company works and explains it very well. I read this on his review which totally convinced me to have nothing to do with these people

The catch, if it can be called that, lies in the “evaluation surveys” (more about that later). Here the company signs-up members for a number of product trials and then later on passes a part of its own commissions to these members. This is followed by the dispatching of some stock surveys, which gives off the impression that you’re giving out useful feedback.

Although this tactic is entirely legal, there’s no denying about its deceptiveness as it doesn’t conform to accepted market research methods. Similarly, the payouts advertised by the company are also smartly inflated.

For instance, as a member you might be offered a 10-day trial run at an internet dating site. Say you are charged $30 by the dating site for the given trial period and at the end of it, Vindale Research remunerates you $45. Now although you end up being paid only $15, the company says it paid you $45.

Vindale Research is not an outright scam. But, I don't like how they do business and will never sign-up for a membership.


Duane Browning

Awakened to Textspam

While trying to get some sleep, I received five text messages in just a few minutes:

From: CRCEZ@AMVWRFD.com

Subject:Message id:CZZC
CentralPacificBan.k CWGG alert 597567.Please call [515]309-6975

From: CQGTZ@VGSZKKR.com

Subject:Message id:CQQM
CentralPacificBan.k AWQG alert 123759.Please call [515]309-6975

From: RCZXS@BEYDMJY.com

Subject:Message id:FZJD
CentralPacificBan.k FRQL alert 565497.Please call [515]309-6975

From: PHGUK@KBRUVBT.com

Subject:Message id:FZEX
CentralPacificBan.k QQNG alert 977814.Please call [515]309-6975

From: CLFUQ@MWKQQXS.com

Subject:Message id:HPYH
CentralPacificBan.k QAGM alert 713353.Please call [515]309-6975

Doing a reverse lookup revealed the number given as registered to a customer of cellular provider Windstream, a company formerly known as Paetec. Getting through to a real person at customer service was a bit difficult, but eventually I spoke to someone who asked me to send my complaint to abuse@hostedsolutions.com
and I paused only long enough to post this information on my blog.

The reported goal of the spammer is to get you to call the number, then you'll be told that your credit card has been blocked. You will then be directed to enter your card number to unblock it. Of course, it's just a phishing scam and the scammers are just trying to steal your credit card information.

Duane Browning

A More Realistic View of Mother Theresa of Calcutta

Many in the West have long viewed Mother Theresa as a selfless advocate for the poor and wretched of the world. However, the Truth is that Mother Theresa was demonstrably a self-serving religious fanatic to did little to nothing to reduce suffering anywhere.

Here are two documentaries on YouTube that you can watch and come to your own conclusions

Mother Teresa - Hell's Angel 

Penn & Teller's "Bullshit - Holier Than Thou"

I was inspired to write this entry after reading this article "A new exposé of Mother Teresa shows that she—and the Vatican—were even worse than we thought" and I decided to post this entry with information and links gathered from the 'Net.

A truly damning expose of Mother Theresa's hypocrisy was "Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict" by Aroup Chatterjee. However, that book is difficult to obtain, even from Amazon.com, but it is available online and you can read it here. Mr Hitchens also responded to a criticism of his book in this letter to the editor in The New York Review of Books.

As far as published works, Christopher Hitchens wrote "The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice" and is easily available from the link to the Amazon page I provided or from a nearby bookstore.

There's also "Hope Endures: Leaving Mother Teresa, Losing Faith, and Searching for Meaning" by Colette Livermore.

On the other side of this, the Vatican has already fast-tracked Mother Theresa to become canonized as a saint in the near future. A dubious "miracle" was used as evidence for her beatification, so it looks like she'll be Saint Mother Theresa is a relatively short time.

I think that one rationale for all this hype is that the Roman Catholic Church has been taking quite a beating in the public eye over the past few years, with scandals reported in the media in graphic detail. The Church needs a public figure to be held up for the masses to idolize and Mother Theresa seems to fit the bill. After all, even though they've got priests molesting children, they've also got Mother Theresa, for whatever that's worth.

Duane Browning

Oxford Memo Book

There's nothing particularly fancy about the Oxford Memo Book in the picture. It measures 6 1/8" x 3 3/4", has 72 ruled pages with a simple brown carboard cover. These are the favored notebook of the Honolulu Police Department, the Hawaii Department of Public Safety, some security guards and a number of ordinary people who prefer it to the exclusion of any other notebook.

Some time ago, Oxford decided to stop making these, much to the chagrine of devoted fans. I've seen web postings by people frustrated with the company for its decision and there are a number of people seeking them independantly.

Another company, Roaring Springs, began making them and sells them via their website, but you have to buy a case of 144 notebooks because they don't sell them any other way.

Here in Hawaii, you can buy them singly for $1.90 each at Fisher Hawaii. A friend of mine in California asked me to pickup ten of these for him and mail them over. Naturally, he'll pay for the books and postage. He's a friend, not my brother. Another shocking level of devotion for a notebook! Where will it end??

So, if you're a fan of the now-discontinued Oxford Memo Book in Hawaii, go to Fisher Hawaii and buy as many as you want.

By the way, please don't get mad at the clerks at OfficeMax because the store doesn't stock them (You know who you are).

Duane Browning

What's the Truth About Duvamis?

While trying to watch a Youtube video, I saw an ad for something called "Duvamis". It's supposed to be a way for people to find-out "who they really are" and the ad - which has a long version and a short one - reminded me very much of Scientology, both for its content and its production quality.
You can see the long version here

Being a curious guy and having nothing else to do, I watched the entire ad and then tried to find their website.
The site duvamis.com wasn't hard to find with a simple Google search, but there wasn't much content.

Duvamis also has a blog at duvamis.blogspot.com which claims to offer users a place where they can "express their inner selves" or some bullshit like that.

A quick WhoIs search informed me that duvamis.com is an anonymously-registered domain and its IP address is out of Sofia, Bulgaria.

Now, my instincts began to warn me of a potential scam. Why Bulgaria - a country whose law enforcement abilities against Internet crime are not exactly stellar, mostly because they have no law applicable to the Internet - and not the United States or Western Europe? If they have nothing to hide and only want to help me "find-out who I really am", why hide behind a cloak of anonymity?

Hey, it's entirely possible that these guys are on the level, but too many questions about Duvamis are left unanswered.

As a side note, I found it rather interesting that "Duvamis" is also the name of a fictional person in World of Warcraft. Duvamis was an 80th level gnome mage who was last active on WoW in July 2010, which is only a few months before the domain duvamis.com was registered.

I found that to be particularly interesting.

Personally, I'd advise anyone to stay away from these people.


Special thanks to a reader who did more thorough  background research into Duvamis than I had the time or opportunity to do. With his permission, I have added it to the body of this blog:

A friend asked me to look into this. Message I sent to him below.

"It is definitely weird. The WhoIs information for Duvamis is private but the WhoIs information for the site they're hosting the CSS information on is not.

http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/results.jsp?domain=dvcdn.com

Which lead me to:

http://bip-invest.com/index.php

http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/results.jsp?domain=bip-invest.com

WhoIs information for that opens up a connection between them and:

http://www.orel-invest.com/index.php

http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/results.jsp?domain=orel-invest.com

Both Bulgarian Innovation Projects and Eagle (formerly Orel) Invest look like private equity firms focused on investing in technology. It isn't really suspicious that a fledgling social media site with enough money to launch a relatively high profile ad campaign on Youtube would have investors, and these sorts of companies create shells within shells within shells in the US to dodge regulations, not sure how it works in Bulgaria though.

What is suspicious is that all the names listed under the WhoIs are aliases, two out of three of which seem to share a naming convention with a Youtube commentor named Dragomir Dmitrov with a brand new account that's affiliated with Duvamis.

The person for dvcdn.com is Atanas Rakov, and the person for bip-invest.com is Atanas Dimitrov, there's a third name on orel-invest.com that doesn't fit the convention. All names listed under WhoIs appear to be aliases with no internet history at first blush.

In addition both bip-invest.com and orel-invest.com share the same real world address, which appears to be an apartment complex, not office space, although I'm not overly familiar with Bulgarian architecture and zoning so don't quote me on that.

The only thing that makes me hesitate to call this an out and out project with malicious purposes is that everything not directly associated with Duvamis has been around for more than a few years and there isn't any chatter about past scams that I'm seeing. So maybe legit, maybe not, I don't think there's anything else for me to find without engaging in dirty tricks."

Since the posting of this blog entry, I haven't seen any more ads for Duvamis on YouTube. I'm not saying that one had anything to do with the other. Looking through the comments sections of both of their videos, I discovered that I wasn't the only person who had doubts about it.


Signing-up for an account reveals Duvamis to be a sort of social networking site. As of right now, there's very little in the way of content on the site and very few users, most of whom aren't active beyond setting-up their homepages or "Visions" as Duvamis calls them. The website even has its own way of telling time (too complicated to explain, but it's weird) and they use odd terms for the various sections.

I'm not sure if Duvamis is a social networking site that's trying to be a religion or a religion trying to be a social networking site.

Either way, it's too weird for me.

Duvamis' ad campaign is the perfect example of doing it wrong.

Duane Browning

What Chemtrails Are Really All About

If you're in the dark about what chemtrails really are, you may want to have a look at this video. There's no scientific mumbojumbo, just a plain-speaking man who tells it like it is.

Duane Browning

Attempt to Hijack My Computer

I received this email today:

From: Henry Michael
To: "henry_michael96@yahoo.com"
Sent: Thursday, May 16, 2013 5:17 AM
Subject: THE MONEY IS AVAILABLE

I have just sent the money this morning as you requested yesterday but this will be the last time I will be sending money to Nigeria because I  had to go with a friend of mine before getting this money to u and every necessary information you need to pick the money up has been attached and the senders name is Debbie  Hamilton,  mtcn : 662:623:6744 . so get ur fucking ass down here or else am not going to send any more money.
Love U

Contained within the email, made to look like a Western Union document was an EXE file which likely contains malware designed to hijack my computer and subvert it to use as part of some criminal enterprise or simply to gain access to my files.

As a possible subplot within this scheme, it's written in such a way that a potential reader may come to think that an innocent person is being scammed and will then try to warn the sender that they didn't request any money to be sent. The only thing that would come of that is that the well-intentioned person would simpky have their email address added to the scammers' database.

It's a nice try, but no catch here.

Duane Browning