Privacy Shark - Issues With Email (Was: Do Not Use Privacy Shark - Fraud Alert)

[theymos]

It's pretty sad when people forget their morality because they can hide from civil responsibility behind their computers. You try accusing someone of a crime IRL and you had better be able to back it up or face consequences. All I can do is refuse to trade with you Joe, but if you were in my town and tried this shit with me, you would be punished for your slander.

WTF!? Joe had a legitimate issue: he tried for a long period of time to contact PrivacyShark through various methods. Then he asked on IRC for assistance. Finally, he posted on the forum. It should not be this hard to contact a company that you're doing business with. After this length of time without contact, I don't blame him for being angry and jumping to conclusions a bit.

[1714101516]

1714101516

[1714101516]

1714101516

[sturle]

One thing I did notice that might be the cause of a problem. I sent an email to that crazy address of theirs and hotmail converted all the upper case chars to lowercase.

Email is not case sensitive.

The local-part of mail addresses is indeed case sensitive.  It may not be treated as case sensitive by all MTAs (i.e. mail to Sturle may get delivered to sturle, if this is the local policy), but they are case sensitive by definition in the standard and must never be changed in transit.  The only exception is postmaster.  Let me quote in full from RFC 822:

Code:

3.4.7.  CASE INDEPENDENCE

        Except as noted, alphabetic strings may be represented in  any
        combination of upper and lower case.  The only syntactic units
        which requires preservation of case information are:

                    -  text
                    -  qtext
                    -  dtext
                    -  ctext
                    -  quoted-pair
                    -  local-part, except "Postmaster"

        When matching any other syntactic unit, case is to be ignored.
        For  example, the field-names "From", "FROM", "from", and even
        "FroM" are semantically equal and should all be treated ident-
        ically.

        When generating these units, any mix of upper and  lower  case
        alphabetic  characters  may  be  used.  The case shown in this
        specification is suggested for message-creating processes.

        Note:  The reserved local-part address unit, "Postmaster",  is
               an  exception.   When  the  value "Postmaster" is being
               interpreted, it must be  accepted  in  any  mixture  of
               case, including "POSTMASTER", and "postmaster".

I'm not at all surprised if Hotmail, which has gone from sucking like a vacuum cleaner in 1997 to a universe threatening black hole today, ignores this standard as well as most other standards.  It has become an isolated island on the Internet, unable to deliver mail to anywhere.  I am surprised every time a mail from Hotmail actually reaches my mailbox.

[nanaimogold]

I agree with your assessment of hotmail.

Important here is that the test email I sent _did_ get through.

False accusation of crime is slanderous and shameful.

[joe]

All I can do is refuse to trade with you Joe, but if you were in my town and tried this shit with me, you would be punished for your slander.

I would appreciate it if you set aside any personal or professional relationship with privacy shark and took an unbiased look at the issue here. Privacy Shark's actions were clearly fraudulent, albeit a minor form of fraud caused by gross negligence. Privacy Shark had knowledge and history that email transmission was unreliable, yet continued to accept new business. Additionally, privacy shark once again demonstrated its procedural blame of all players except itself when faced with a problem from a paying customer. It is responsible for me to alert others to the fact that privacy shark had been committing fraud and should be avoided by others to avoid risk of loss. It is extremely irresponsible of privacy shark to deflect all blame away from itself, even outright deny the existence of any problem.

While I look forward to one day visiting your BC town, I am confident that your lack of sound logic and understanding are a rare exception among the people in Nanaimo, and your town would turn against you, and rather see you as the slanderer.

[The Madhatter]

I have been trying to stay out of this thread, but I am unable to turn a blind eye to it anymore. It is too repugnant.

Joe, before you yell fraud (oops, too late), let me ask you one simple question: did you or did you not receive your domain name? Privacy shark claims you did. In the worst case scenario your 'beef' with them is poor customer service, not fraud.

Also, on a "hunch", I just ran a whois on all of the domains listed here (Bitcoin domain name land grab thread):

https://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1829.0

Around 1/3rd of them seem to be on privacy shark's system. Were all of these people scammed too? Why aren't they all yelling fraud as well?

I also vote to rename this thread.

[joe]

I have been trying to stay out of this thread, but I am unable to turn a blind eye to it anymore. It is too repugnant.

It probably would have been best if you restrained yourself and remained out of this thread. The more this thread gets bumped to the top, the worse it will be for privacy shark.

Joe, before you yell fraud (oops, too late), let me ask you one simple question: did you or did you not receive your domain name? Privacy shark claims you did. In the worst case scenario your 'beef' with them is poor customer service, not fraud.

No, I did not receive my domain name. For over a month until I posted this thread I was unable to change its IP address or transfer it to a different provider.

Also, on a "hunch", I just ran a whois on all of the domains listed here (Bitcoin domain name land grab thread):

https://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1829.0

Around 1/3rd of them seem to be on privacy shark's system. Were all of these people scammed too? Why aren't they all yelling fraud as well?

How many times do I have to repeat the facts of this for people to understand what this thread is and what it isn't?
1. Privacy Shark committed fraud by knowingly accepting money for a service they knew was unreliable
2. I lost money because of it. See original post.
3. It is likely others will lose money too.

Why aren't they yelling fraud? Maybe they haven't tried to do anything with those names yet. Maybe privacy shark's email server "likes" theirs. It looks like those domain names were probably registered by only a few people?

Also, there is sadly no competition to my knowledge for what privacy shark offers. If someone knows another service that registers domains and takes bitcoins, I would love to know.

[kiba]

Poor service, probably.

Fraud? That's a bit of a stretch.

[The Madhatter]

No, I did not receive my domain name. For over a month until I posted this thread I was unable to change its IP address or transfer it to a different provider.

Huh? The above statements don't make any sense. You are contradicting yourself. You said you didn't receive a domain name - yet you are trying to change the IP of... what exactly?

How many times do I have to repeat the facts of this for people to understand what this thread is and what it isn't?

At least once more. You are still not making any sense, and my patience with you and this thread is nearing an end.

1. Privacy Shark committed fraud by knowingly accepting money for a service they knew was unreliable

Unreliable by whose standards? Yours? Obviously not the other few dozen people who have placed orders with them.

FYI: An "unreliable" service sold without any guarantees is not fraud.

Maybe privacy shark's email server "likes" theirs.

Oh come on. I'm sure they didn't single you out and ignore you for fun. You're being dramatic.

It looks like those domain names were probably registered by only a few people?

You know this because... ? Please provide sources.