From the monthly archives:

July 2009

My Name.com Account with 14 Premium Domains Hijacked

by Aqeel Syed on July 30, 2009

In past I blogged about domain name hijacking at syedaqeel.com and today I myself become a victim of domain hijacking.

I’d three very hard days,  4 days back my gmail account was hacked somehow and then the hacker cracked my Name.com account from there. I’ve 14 premium domains at Name.com which I was about to lose when I got an automatic alert through Sucuri.net that syedaqeel.com is not available. Domain was giving a 500 internal page error, I thought hosting for that domain is down (its placed on a shared hosting account), I waited for syedaqeel.com to become available. SyedAqeel.com become available after 24 hours, I decided to move it to my dedicated server to avoid further down time.

When I tried to login to my name.com account to change DNS settings, and what I found was surprising, after many tries with right password I was not able to login and when I tried to reset my password it showed that an email is sent at your hotmail.com address.

I was shocked! Yes, email was sent to someone else’s email address, as I used a Gmail account with name.com. It was confirmed that my Name.com account is compromised. My first reaction was to check how it happen and to be true, its almost impossible to crack a name.com account with brute force type attacks, as name.com have very good security.

As I checked who is for syedaqeel.com and thewondrous.com I found that contact, billing and administrator information is changed and a person with name of “Abbas Shafiee” and company name “Yamobile”.

I logged back to gmail and started checking my account that why name.com haven’t sent me a password change or wrong password notification, after going through my account I found some filters, when of them was set by hacker to automatically delete all emails coming from name.com

The first thing I did to check my system for viruses and couldn’t found anything suspicious. Next I changed passwords for all my important accounts.

So who is the cracker?

I Googled to find more about names in who is i.e,  ”Abbas Shafiee” and “Yamobile”. When I dugg deep into results, I found some interesting pages. His full name is “Abbas Sufi Shafiee” and he used to run a blog at yamobile.blogpsot.com and also own a domain yamobile.org hosted at a free web host.

This search reveals that he is an Irani guy and a hacktivists, working against government. Has built some proxies to bypass Irani government’s internet filters. A few forum posts displayed that he is interested in Java scripts and his site at yamobile.org is about keyloggers. He is from Iran but using a fake US address in who is information.

July 28, 2009 at 3:19 PM

I sent an email to name.com informing them that my name.com account is compromised and started waiting for their reply.  After few hours, I sent another email explaining their support in detail, what has happened and requesting to freeze my account so that he can’t transfer domains to any other registrar.

After waiting for 7 hours, I was so worried, so devastated and haven’t got any reply. I tried to contact them through twitter but didn’t found any reply.

It took me 9 hours, 3 emails from 2 different addresses, Twitter tweets, a phone call, a fax and finally a problem report at their GetSatisfaction to contact name.com support.

They sent me a few question, for those I replied promptly, waited for 5 hours to get their reply and guy at support shocked me by telling that it will take them 15 days to complete investigation.

15 days!!! I told their support that these are not just domain laying around, I have full developed websites on these domains & I don’t want to lose my readership.

Any how name.com locked that account so worries were less.

July 29, 2009

To expedite investigation process I sent name.com documents verified by Notary Public for my identity verification.

I sent an email to Aibek, admin of the top technology blog MakeUseOf.com (MakeUseOf.com was hacked in November 2008). I asked Aibek what to do in this situation, Aibek replied promptly giving some quick tips and asked me to make it public with detail and proofs.

Contacting The Cracker

On July 29 I sent an email to Abbas Shafie’s email address displaying in who is and asked him why did he hacked my account & now what does he want? His response was,

dude i bought these domains with a cheap price, i can show you that 300$ has been gone from my paypal account
dude i bought them….
Theft?

what i had to do now ? 
can i report this to paypal ?

And when in next email I asked who sold you these domains? He said Aqeel Syed! What a joke it is! Apart from all this serious situation I kept laughing.

I sold him all my established domains for $300 as I need money and was in hurry. The fact is I pay $300 in hosting fee every month for these sites, these sites has generated $3000 in affiliate sales and I got business of $2000 from these domains. The other thing is he said I was paid by PayPal! Ah! I wish badly that PayPal should have been available in Pakistan. Shafiee even don’t know that PayPal do not support Pakistan, how false his accusation is!

July 29, 2009 at 11 PM
Name.com support informed me that investigation is almost complete and they will get back to me quickly. I was asked to create a new account where they will move my domains.

July 31, 1 AM

I’m still waiting to be contacted from name.com. They are good at what they do, but I’m not satisfied with their support. Even in a serious matter like that they are not replying, TheWondrous.com is down and I’m helpless. I can’t do anything about that site, frustrated waiting for name.com support to do something.

July 31, 3 AM Domains are back!

Finally I recieved a good email from name.com support, they had returned me my domains. Apart from initial disappointment name.com support helped me out. Its a good news, that theft ruined 4 work days and devastated a lot. Thank you all our readers, friends, twitter contacts, Aibek from Makeusof.com & name.com support for helping us in this bad situation.

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Getting High PR Backlinks

by Aqeel Syed on July 25, 2009

Links are very important factor in ranking of a website in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). All major search engines consider back links as a major factor in deciding quality of a webpage. Google’s PR algorithm is based on backlinks.

SEO and link building is not what it used to be few years back. Google these days pays more importance on quality of backlinks than quantity. A relevant contextual backlink is far more valuable than a handful of unrelated low quality backlinks.

In this article we are discussing 3 ways to get high quality baklinks for free.

1. Free Backlink from Apple.com

Apple.com is PR 9 and the page itself where you are getting link is PR 7.  Work around to get this juicy, high quality link is to create an Iphone App. And to do it, you just need to create a Web App made for the iPhone and then submit it to their directory. You can even create something basic and simple (but I would suggest useful).

This simple search on Google, give lots of ideas on creating an Iphone App.

2. Grab You Free Backlink for Google Profiles

You can use Google Profiles to grab a free link from Google.com. You just need to fill the information that they ask about yourself, include the URL of your website, add some pictures and description, one more backlink. As long as you add enough information, your profile will be displayed in Google’s search results, and it should count as a normal backlink because Google does not use the nofollow attribute on the website links.

You can also use this service to improve your SERM (Search Engine Reputation Management), as this profile is going to rank with your name in search results. You can see my profile here.

3. Backlink from a PR 10 website, Adobe.com!

Adobe.com is one of the few elite those have PR 10 so you can imagine how much authority that domain have. If you use Adobe products and have done some development you can get a PR from subdomain, forums.adobe.com which has a PR 9 by joining its communities and adding your backlink in your profile.

Their are many other easier ways to get backlinks from high PR domains, do you have used any? Please share your experiences.

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PayPal Alternatives in Pakistan and Countries those are Not Supported by PayPal

by Aqeel Syed on July 19, 2009

PayPal is an awesome international payment method that can be used online effectively by freelancers and businesses to send/receive payments. It is the most widely used payment method. But unfortunately, PayPal do not support Pakistan and  many other countries.

If you are from Pakistan or any other non supported country, you cannot send/receive payments through PayPal, the most unfortunate and frustrating thing is that you cannot even pay using credit card if merchant is only accepting PayPal. So you often cannot buy that useful piece of software, some great ebooks or you cannot get paid by many online programs.

I lost business of thousands of dollars online because of unavailability of PayPal. So I hate PayPal and on other hand also want it badly :P

Leaving all the sour discussion why PayPal is not available in Pakistan either because of lame policies of State Bank of Pakistan or because of high fraud rate, whatever it is :( I’m going to discuss few PayPal alternatives those can help you survive and in some cases thrive online.

Payoneer.com

I love Payoneer and its at top of my list for a PayPal alternative. I was first introduced to Payoneer by my parnter and mentor David Daniels in 2007. We selected Payoneer for our company as a payment method over Western Union to pay freelancers and employs.

Payoneer gives you a Master Debit Card. Funds can be withdrawn from ATMs, in Pakistan Payoneer card can be used at MNet ATMs (MCB, Standard Chartered and Citi Bank).Your clients can load money to your card using credit cards and US ACH. With Payoneer you can also accept ACH. Low monthly maintenance fee and fast availability of funds makes it an ideal choice.

However getting a card is a little tricky process for newbie freelancers, you cannot  apply directly at Payoneer’s site for a Master Card, you can get a card if you are affiliated with one of their partners like Guru.com, 2CO and GetAFreelancer.com (etc).

2CO

2CO or 2Chekcout is a long standing and respectable payment solution. Lots of websites on the Internet use it including some Pakistani sites. You can accept PayPal payments using 2CO. 2CO has a handy feature of “customer invoicing”. You can send invoices to your clients by email. 2CO also offers Payoneer Master card, you can withdraw funds from 2CO using Payoneer Master Card or through check/wire transfer to your bank account.

The downside of 2CO is that you have to pay $50 sign up fee and its difficult (almost not possible) to implement one 2CO account on multiple sites. Also you cannot sell many products using 2CO including web hosting.

However for one site and for invoicing clients through email, 2CO works great.

MoneyBookers.com

MoneyBookers can be used for receiving and sending funds (person to person and person to business transfers). MoneyBookers can wire you internationally, you can receive funds in MCB and UBL in 3 – 4 days. However very small number of merchants accept MoneyBookers online, it means you cannot have access to good web hosting companies, big stores and other services if you use MoneyBookers. An other downside is that MoneyBookers do not accpet Maste Card, payments can only be made using VISA cards (I don’t understand why they are not solving this issue).

AlertPay

AlertPay can be used for receiving payments from clients. It is a Payment Processor that is mainly used by Paid To Click (PTC), Paid To Read (PTR) and High Yield Investment Program (HYIP) type sites…And more recently for multiple large business and financial transactions across Europe and Asia.

There are 3 types of account – Personal Starter, Personal Pro and Business. All are free to join. For a quick start you can get a personal account for free and you can withdraw money via Check, Bank Wire and Bank Transfer.. The downside with AlertPay is that you cannot load funds to your AlertPay account from Pakistan.

CCNow

CCNow is a merchant account (credit card processor) that also accepts PayPal payments, same as 2CO. You can get start accepting payments with CCNow for only $10. You can withdraw money via Check, Bank Wire and Bank Transfer.

Plimus

Plimus is an other payment processor same as 2CO. Plimus is free to join, you can implement it on multiple websites and take payment from PayPal. You can withdraw money via Check, Bank Wire and Bank Transfer after paying Plimus commission.

Payoneer, AlertPay, MoneyBookers and 2CO are very good for newbie freelancers and if you are an expert and have several sites where you want to sell your products then go for CCNow and plimus.

If this article was of any help to you, please share your opinion through comments section.

{ 31 comments }

SINGLEHOP You Should Revise Your Sales Policy

by Aqeel Syed on July 6, 2009

I’m so disappointed with one of the best dedicated hosts, SINGLEHOP. Yes they are the best but they have a lame sales policy. I ordered a dedicated server yesterday and today SINGLEHOP sales team informed me that they cannot process my order due to high fraud risk. High fraud risk? Yes, high fraud risk because I live in a 3rd world country, Pakistan. I offered them identification documents like international passport, drivers license but sales representative only provided a rude response. “No, we cannot process this order.”

In last 4 years, working as a web entrepreneur, I partnered with several web hosts, from shared web hosts to dedicated hosts, and some cloud hosting platforms but no other host had such fraud prevention policy. Some of these hosts had confirmed my identification by requesting passport copy, drivers license but no one had given such response, “best of luck finding your new host”.

SINGLEHOP you should revise your sales policy, not everyone in Pakistan or 3rd world countries is a fraud, people are doing legit business. They have partnerships all over the world. It hurts when you see everyone of us as fraud!

From GoDaddy to ThePlanet, Mosso, DreamHost, Site5, XLHost… (its a long list) everyone is doing business with us, they are huge, large seasoned companies but they are not rejecting orders from Pakistan or 3rd world countries saying we cannot process due to high fraud risk. You should revise this biased sales policy.

Update:

From writing this post to editing this post its only difference of 70 minutes. SINGLEHOP account executive contacted me by phone and email. Apart from initial confusion, they had great support, I’m so impressed. They requested ID documents which I provided and my order is processed with some custom changes from me.
Thumbs UP SINGLEHOP, no doubt you people are the best dedicated web host with best dedicated support.
My Yorkfield 2.8 x 4 GHz server with 8 GB RAM is about to deliver. I’m very excited and will post a review of SINGLEHOP services in next days.

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