fake posts

Popular and boisterous tech blog Boy Genius Report this week ran what one of their contacts claimed to be Apple's Black Friday ad. The ad claimed that Apple would be going against tradition and offering huge cuts across the Apple lineup.

Just how big were the claimed discounts? The ad claims that Apple will offer up to 30% off of all iPods, up to 25% off of all Macs and up to 15% off of accessories, software and other Mac hardware. Needless to say, these would be big, and I mean BIG, discounts for Apple to pull out on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. If they were true, that is.

Imagine you're minding your own business looking for a new coat at Burlington Coat Factory on an idle Tuesday afternoon when a stretch Hummer Limo rolls up and out jumps Linda Brown, 45, who tells the entire store that she won a $1.5 million lottery prize and wanted to spend $500 on everyone in the store.

Sounds a little too good to be true doesn't it? After all, stories like this only happen in the movies, but lo and behold, Brown began paying for purchase after purchase using her debit card while the store became crowded with friends and family who had been alerted to the once-in-a-lifetime deal. The Columbus Dispatch reports that by 2 p.m. word had spread to so many shoppers that the lines wove through the entire store!

With more and more purchases being made online, product reviews on major e-commerce sites like Amazon.com have quickly become more important to a product's success than expensive ad campaigns.

This value hasn't gone unnoticed by online retailers, who have quickly made user reviews a a standard feature for online stores. It didn't take too long after that for companies to catch onto the power of the reviews either, which has led some to try and bribe users for better reviews. That's exactly what happened to one Amazon customer, but when he called attention to the bribery in his product review, Amazon deleted it not once but TWICE.

Auction site eBay won a big victory in federal court yesterday. Tiffany & Co. sued eBay in 2004 after asking the company to remove listings with the Tiffany name in them. Tiffany claimed that eBay knew many counterfeit goods were being auctioned on the site, and that eBay had a responsibility to stop them.

The court ruled in eBay's favor, saying that it is Tiffany's responsibility to protect its own trademarks, not the auction company. The judge said that general knowledge of trademark infringement didn't make eBay responsible for the infringement.

Last week, eBay lost a similar suit in France, brought by LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA. The maker of luxury goods won a judgment of over $61 million against eBay because of the sale of counterfeit purses, perfume, and accessories.

Counterfeit $100 bills are circling the globe, and their story is intriguing. These bills are so well done that that it's next to impossible to tell that they're fakes. They've been dubbed "supernotes" because of their precision.

Experts say these are the most sophisticated examples of counterfeit U.S. currency ever seen. They are made of the exact same cotton and linen mix from which legitimate U.S. currency is made. They even have the proper-colored microfibers and an embedded strip that glows under ultraviolet light... both key pieces of currency that are supposed to be difficult to counterfeit. The fake bills also have the proper microprint and optically variable ink (OVI) that distinguishes authentic U.S currency.

Authorities say the bills haven't been printed in large quantities. Only $50 million of supernotes have been found since 1989, which is estimated to be too little to even cover the cost of the sophisticated printing process required.