TomTheGeek

All the geeky stuff that gets me hot.

Friday, November 30, 2007

Shentech.com fraud warning

These guys always seemed pretty sketchy but I never had any real problems with them or at least so I thought. Turns out they're taking people's credit card information and opening bogus UPS commercial accounts then using them to make large shipments.

Brusk says:
Indeed. I bought something from Shentech about 5-6 years ago, and incurred a world of hurt. I bought a mouse--an Dell-branded Logitech USB mouse for about 6 bucks (great mouse, still going strong). Then over a year letter I discovered that someone had opened a commercial UPS account in my name and used it to ship wholesale quantities of goods from China to Shentech's address in Queens. I found this out when I received the bill. UPS was good about it and the bill went away...for a few months. Then another similar bill arrived at my new address (I'd moved from NYC to California). Again UPS's fraud squad dealt with it. I guess it was pretty obvious that someone who doesn't have a business wouldn't be shipping several thousand pounds of equipment across the Pacific. But they did something nasty with my contact info, and I've watched my credit reports carefully ever since.

So yeah, Shentech is evil.

This exact thing happened to me only I didn't realize what was going on. I've ordered several small items from them (fan guards, colored screws, ect..) in the past and one day I get this bill from UPS for a shipment of t-shirts to an address in NY. I simply called UPS and got them to dismiss the charges and forgot about it. I got a second bill a little while later but I just called a second time and I've never heard from them since. Because it went away so easily I never really looked into it but I wish I still had the bill so I could verify that it had the same address.

If there are any remaining doubts about Shentech just follow the fraud warning link at the top and check out their rating and read some reviews. None of this is proven of course, it's merely second hand accounts and circumstantial evidence but given the number of people they've pissed off and the fact that they're shipping counterfeit laptop batteries that can explode or catch fire I won't be buying anything from them for a long, long time.

Thursday, November 01, 2007

Enable IMAP on your Gmail account


If you're like me you've been eagerly waiting for Gmail to enable IMAP access ever since you created your account. They've been slowly enabling it for a while now but today I learned a neat trick.

Go into settings and change your language setting to English(UK). Select "no" when it asks you if you want to enable it for your other google apps because the next step is to change it back to English(US). After that you should see IMAP enabled in settings.

No guarantees that it will work for you but it worked for me.