A friend forwarded this to me and asked if I thought it was a good deal:
> http://www.cdcheap.biz/foryou/
>
> Windows XP
> Professional 2002
> $50
> Retail price: $270.99
> Our low Price: $50.00
> You Save: $220.00
These guys appear to be selling pirated software or even worse, collecting credit card numbers.
I dug through my archive of ‘Spam’ and found several messages from them. Several things tell me something is wrong with this deal.
Biggest is their pricing. While Windows XP for $60 is almost believeable, Office XP, Photoshop and Pagemaker at those prices isn’t.
Another is the way they create their links. Rolling over the link with my mouse in my email program shows a link like this:
http://drs.yahoo.com/codfishshanty/syllable/
=mockupperclassmen/*http://www.cdcheap.biz/re/clean.php
Notice the beginning of the link looks like it is a Yahoo store, a nice respectable business. However, you end up at the chcheap.biz sitting out there at the end of the link. Why would they try to hide that?
A third way is a little more technical, I looked up their cdcheap.biz registration information. You can go to http://whois.sc/ and enter cdcheap.biz in the look up box. It returns the name and address of the company that registered that domain. In this case, it is:
Registrant Name: Alexander Popov
Registrant Organization: CDATLOW
Registrant Address1: Parking St
Registrant City: New York
Registrant State/Province: NY
Registrant Postal Code: 12345
Registrant Country: United States
Registrant Country Code: US
Registrant Phone Number: +1.18002560912
Registrant Email: cdatlow@mail.ru
Several things wrong here, can you spot them? No street address for Parking St. Zip code looks a little suspect, what are the chances that they are in zip code 12345? And I happen to know that mail.ru is a Russian equivalent to hotmail.com, why would a legitimate business be using a free email service from Russia?
Lastly, I can’t connect to their website, I bet someone else has complained to their webhost and they’ve been disconnected.
As a rule, I ignore all offers from spam or unsolicted email. I get too much that is like this, looking very much like a scam, to even trust ones that look legit from all angles. Unless you get an offer from a company you directly signed up with, I’d reccomend trashing it.