Are Adarsh Jaiswal & Deepika Verma fronting a company scamming elderly pensioners on the NSW North Coast?

Snapshots taken 13 August 2011

Click on images to enlarge

Excerpt from The Daily Examiner 15 August 2011:

The South Grafton pensioner said she thought it was her internet service provider Bigpond – talking urgently in a thick Indian accent – after all, he knew her full name.

“We need to check your computer Shirley,” the voice said. “People are getting in and stealing gigabytes.”

Before she knew it, Shirley's screen was scrolling madly and the voice on the phone said, “look, they're taking stuff now”.

“I must have given him permission (to access the computer remotely) but I don't remember. He took control of the mouse.”

The man told her it would cost $159 to fix the problem and she would need two “installations” to get coverage for life.

So Shirley, desperate to stop the cyber thieves, gave her credit card number and she was billed $318.

But it dawned on Shirley that she had been scammed.

“I couldn't sleep all night and I was so ashamed I didn't want to tell anyone,” she said. “I know I've been stupid but they sounded so genuine.

“My granddaughter was so cranky that someone would rip me off, she told me to go to the police and the Examiner because these people were obviously targetting older people.”

Shirley received an invoice from E-Pro Solution via email for a 24-month platinum plan support package. The invoice said the company was based in Luton, London.

That is what happened once a man called “Chris” telephoned a 77 year old woman living in the Clarence Valley.

Now E-Pro Solutions states on its website that it has offices in the U.K. and India and that it is owned and operated by NDCL INFOSOULE.

This company sells a product with the same description as the one ‘sold’ to the pensioner and its published price is equivalent to the amount of money paid by credit card for said product.

There is a company called NDCL INFOSOUL which can be called up with a simple Internet search. It happens to currently share the same physical address in India with E-Pro Solutions, as well as the identical main landline telephone number.

The very dodgy method used to sell product has been reported by Internet users for the last two years at least and could easily be called a scam.

Here is one post on a Whirlpool forum this year:

Not sure if anyone has received calls from this apparent company so far, but I received one today and it sounded super dodgy, so I just wanted to warn others about it (although admittedly most people who browse this type of website/forum probably wouldn't get sucked in for this sort of call).

They say they are from E-PRO SOLUTIONS, a company which has been employed by "Windows Computer Maintenance Department."

They say they have discovered that you have inadvertently downloaded junk from the internet and it is slowing down your computer, and that they can quickly remedy the problem by going through a process which I think allows them remote access to your computer.

They say they are calling from an office in Australia (the address they gave me was 83 Yaran Street, Evans Head, NSW 2473), but the three people I spoke to (two guys and one girl) all had heavy Indian accents (two of the names they gave me were David Mark and Peter Williams), and they also lied when I asked them about the weather there at the time.

When I asked for their details, the phone number they gave me was: 08 7200 7207.

Cheers.

It should be noted here that the address cited in the post does not exist as Yaran Street is a short street with no more than 18 residential lots according to Google Maps and, the telephone number is three digits out from E-Pro Solutions published West Australian telephone number.

Reverse Australia has fielded so many queries that it now features sample complaints like this one:

Contacted by "Julia Kidman" and "Harry Watson", so say from South Melbourne, Victoria, both working for E-Pro Solutions, acting on behalf of Microsoft Windows, that they had detected problems on our computer.
Landline contact is : 0872 001 707
Website: www.e-prosolutions.com , and
Email address: support@www.e-prosolutions.com
Requested to go into “start and r “ depressed together, and looked at application and system logs with errors and warnings in them. Asked to count the number of each, and got to about 30 warnings and about 5 or more errors or so, in each, then stopped scrolling through.
Asked for peoples names, and provided with above names, which are English names, but the people were Indian (or Pakistani), by accent. Was to be put through to technicians, via the “Support Connection” window, and they were going to provide a password, which should not be given to anyone else!!
I hung up and checked the White pages, which does not have a name anything like "E-pro solutions".
These people through their website, www.e-prosolution.com, should be tracked down, or they are just using this website for their own purposes. Whatever the situation, do not touch with a barge pole.
Tony, Perth, Western Australia 19 April 2011

E-Pro Solutions is also implicated in similar complaints in the U.S. and Microsoft Answers has been fielding queries about E-Pro since 2010. An e-commerce company dri swreg cardquery com is sometimes mentioned as processing its online billing

It is possible that E-Pro Solutions is unaware of this ‘scam’ and Mr. Adarsh Jaiswal & Ms. Deepika Verma are legitimate business people. That the problem may lie elsewhere.

I leave that up to readers to decide.

Little Sir Echo

The world watched in awful fascination as rabid Tea Party politicians brought America to its knees and caused stock exchanges world-wide to haemorrhage, because these same elected representatives mindlessly insisted that Small Government was God and pursued a goal of unrealistic federal budget cuts.

In Australia a Coalition Opposition led by Tony Abbott is obviously intent on mimicking this disastrous course with the policy announcement that should Tones the Terrible win government he expects to produce small government and $70 billion in budget savings.

One could sack as many as 20,000 federal public servants and hole the government grants system and never come anywhere near saving that many billions, so it doesn’t take a genius to see who will be the bunnies making the remainder of these excessive ‘savings’.

That amount of money withdrawn from federal government spending would represent roughly $3,000 less per person each year spent on either vital health services, education, family assistance payments, old age pension increases or PBS medications – just to name a few of the areas to which Abbott and Hockey could take their knives.

This level of mass sackings and belt tightening imposed on average Australian families will be painful to endure and also something which would put the wind up voters and possibly the market once it looked closely at the flow-on effects.

Australia & New Zealand- we're happy and we know it!

If Gallup’s World Giving Index 2010 is any indication, then Australia and New Zealand are prosperous, happy and generous nations:

Australia and New Zealand are, jointly, the most ‘giving’ countries in the world. These countries both boast a World Giving Index score (the average of their scores on ‘giving money’, ‘giving time’, and ‘helping a stranger’) of 57%. ….

both countries appear in the top twenty for all three behaviours…..

The link between the giving of money and happiness is stronger (a coefficient of 0.69) than the link between the giving of money and the GDP of a nation (0.58). It would be reasonable to conclude that giving is more an emotional act than a rational one….

The Queensland University of Technology’s Australian Centre for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Studies February 2011 report on major gift giving indicates that most of this giving is historically done in Australia by people making donations ranging from $1 to $3,000.

In New Zealand the most common form of giving is the ad hoc donation of money or goods to an appeal, with the highest level of support going to clubs/community organisations and primary/secondary education, according to a 2009 discussion paper.

So all those ordinary wage earners, self-funded retirees, pensioners and generous others residing on each side of The Ditch who are buying jam from street stalls, raffle tickets from school children, emptying small change into the hands of door-to-door charity collectors or sending modest cheques to a worthy cause – take a bow because you lead the world.

Profile of a McDonald's fast food customer

Pic from ourweed.com

The discovery of 79g of marijuana inside a McDonald's brown paper takeaway bag led to police confiscating a total of 130g from one fast food afficianado on the 6th June 2011.
Locals are pointing to the possibility that he was a customer of the McDonald's hamburger joint in Yamba.
Just another reason why franchisee Scott Campbell's name is not top of the pops in that small NSW coastal town.

Will NSW Nats MP Steve Cansdell take up Lynne Mowbray's challenge?

On Page One of The Daily Examiner on 9 August 2011 one distressed local threw down a gauntlet in front of the Nationals Member for Clarence and Parliamentary Secretary for Police, Steve Candell, who is part of the NSW OFarrell Government:

ON WEDNESDAY afternoon several people at a Maclean car park witnessed an incident involving three people who appeared to be severely affected by alcohol and drugs.....
The two males continued harassing the woman to get back behind the wheel and continue driving as she was the only one who appeared to possess a licence.
It was obvious the two males were agitated. One appeared to be extremely volatile and aggressive and the other reeked of alcohol.
They ended up taking off in the car, driven by the highly intoxicated man and leaving the woman behind.
This incident was reported to the police out of fear these people were a mobile time bomb.
The Maclean police station was unattended at the time and the communication machine on the wall was faulty....
He explained there was no police presence in the Lower Clarence area on that day and an earlier domestic violence matter at Harwood had to be attended by the only available police car, which had to travel from Grafton.
I was in disbelief there was not one officer on duty in the whole of the Maclean, Yamba and Iluka areas.
As the police officer relayed this information to me I couldn't help but flash-back to three years ago when I witnessed a motorist asleep behind the wheel of his car, which was parked in the middle of the road leading into Maclean, at night with the lights off.
After waking him that night he appeared hostile and to be under the influence of either alcohol or drugs. I followed him into town as he drove on the wrong side of the road towards oncoming traffic.
I phoned the police twice, pleading with them to stop him before he killed someone, but I was told there was no police presence in Maclean, as they were called out to Yamba.
There were several other accounts of people being forced off the road as he headed towards his destination.
I remembered the gut-wrenching hopelessness and desperation I felt when the police called me back a short time later and asked me to come into the station the next day to provide details for a coronial inquest into the man's death. He ended-up hitting a tree at Ashby at high speed.
I remember how I sobbed uncontrollably, knowing I did my best to save this man but the “system” let me down.
The lack of police in the area that night not only left me scarred for the rest of my days, but also affected the police who attended that scene, the tow truck operator, the undertaker who attended and the family, neighbours and friends who were left to grieve.
The system let us all down that night.
In his new appointment as Parliamentary Secretary for Police and Emergency Services, I challenge the Member for Clarence, Steve Cansdell, to table this editorial in parliament.
The days of talking the talk are gone. It's now time to walk the walk.
Your electorate is lagging in police numbers and it's up to you to not just fight for change, but to deliver it. You have been given the baton and now is your time to run with it.
Give our police the control they need in their own area and enough police officers to staff our stations and reduce the work-related stress of our officers.
I can't help thinking that if we had our police station in Maclean staffed three years ago, that man would still be around today. It grieves me to think that while we play politics it is our community that suffers.
Please end this absurd disregard for our struggling officers and this community's safety and peace of mind.

Put a hand in your pocket for the Horn of Africa

No glib comment is needed as a reminder that famine is always with us somewhere in the world. This time it is the Horn Of Africa and Somalia in particular which is bearing the brunt of widespread drought and crop failure.

So come on Aussies, put a hand in your pocket and send a donation to the Australian fundraising arm of the United Nations Refugee Agency, Australia for UNHCR and the East Africa Emergency Appeal online by credit card or call 1300 440 433 or 1300 361 288 (within Australia) to find out how/where to send cheques or money orders.

“All donations in response to this appeal will go directly towards UNHCR's emergency relief operations in East Africa, providing much-needed essentials like food, clean water, shelter, sanitation, survival kits and emergency feeding and nutrition programs.

90 cents in every dollar donated will go directly to the field to help people in need in East Africa.”

Photographs of famine victims found at Google Images

Never a truer word said by CNN

Australia's best place to visit....
Then a pod of dolphins explodes from the water and the hype about Yamba suddenly appears understated.

Anony-mice

Yamba

* GuestSpeak is a feature of North Coast Voices allowing Northern Rivers residents to make satirical or serious comment on issues that concern them. Posts of 250-300 words or less can be submitted to ncvguestspeak AT gmail.com.au for consideration.

A plea from the heart by the digitally disadvantaged

A not uncommon complaint heard right across the Clarence Valley.

Dreyfuss in July 2011 on a Clarence Conversations forum:

The area around Melaleuca drive in Yamba is in desperate need of upgrading by Telstra. When the subdivision was first done telecom and the developer did some “clever” thing with the phone lines designed to save money and that now stops the residents from getting effective ADSL connections. Speeds of 0.22kbps are common, ADSL 2 is offered by Internet Service Providers (ISP) but not available, is some cases residents are being refused ADSL connections all together. When you contact Telstra about getting the lines upgraded and they say talk to your ISP, then you talk to you ISP and they say there is nothing that can be done until Telstra upgrade the phone lines talk to Telstra. NBN may be some 5 years away (if ever), the mobile reception in the area is appalling so wireless is not an option. This area is only 4 kilometres from the Yamba exchange and less than 1 kilometre from the Treeland Drive retail district! How long will the residents be forced to suffer because of the original cost cutting by Telecom (Telstra) and the Developer? I urge anybody that is affected to contact the Grafton office of Janelle Saffin 6621 9909 email Peter.ellem@aph.gov.au

AntoniusFM in August 2011 on the same forum thread:

No ADSL in Wells Crossing, satellite is no option (too slow, too much delay), so using wireless, which isn't that great (1.5 Mbps if i am lucky), especially because i need it for my work (self employed IT consultant). I would have wished the government invested a bit more in wireless technology. The NBN sounds nice, but there is no way in the world we are going to have fibre optics where I live. Very disappointing !

When ad men go bad

Oh Todd, Todd, Todd.......

what a choice of T-shirt!

Sometimes the young (and assorted others) make my heart sing - Part Four

http://youtu.be/bG7wbAfcKUI

For the purists here is Nick Cave unadorned