How To Uncover Online Car Escrow Scams. The internet is inherently deceptive. While I know most of you assume I write from a luxurious, sumptuously upholstered cabin in a perpetually globe circling zeppelin, the truth is that Im usually stationed on a damp mattress crammed into the back of a wrecked Econoline. In much the same way, a car buying website with a name you trust may, in fact, be a total scam. Like this fake Edmunds site is. Neither the scam nor many of these sites are new, exactly, but theyre still very much around and many are designed well enough that they can be deceptive to many car buyers. The Beam Me Up, Scotty trope as used in popular culture. Lines that people associate with something or someone by way of PopCultural Osmosis, despite. Whats the scam The basic scam is pretty simple the site claims to be a respected escrow service, to add a layer of security when youre paying a lot of money for a car to a stranger. Heres how a site that seems to be part of the respected Edmunds. Buyer and Seller agree to term. Buyer submits payment to Edmunds. Seller or Edmunds delivers the vehicle to buyer. Buyer approves the vehicle. Edmunds releases payment to seller. The scam here is that the escrow site is first, not associated with Edmunds, and second, the escrow site isnt an escrow site at all, just some jackass who will take your money and keep it. A reader sent us the link to this particular site, the one that claims to be part of Edmunds so thats the one well focus on now, but remember, theres more of these sites. Looking at the site, it apes the look and feel of the normal Edmunds site pretty well As you can see, the fake site mimics the Edmunds logo, top navigation bar design, typography, and overall look and feel. Its not quite perfect, but to a great many car buyers, its more than close enough. Even the URL of the site is deceptive. The real Edmunds is www. Download Sound Homer Simpson Mugen Characters Super' title='Download Sound Homer Simpson Mugen Characters Super' />Hotwapi. Com is a mobile toplist for mobile web sites. We have over 2000 registered sites. Subscribe and SAVE, give a gift subscription or get help with an existing subscription by clicking the links below each cover image. Edmunds escrow site is www. To many users, seeing the edmunds. Edmunds. Its not, of course. The actual web domain is the inv sll. WHOIS on that domain, we find this Last we checked, Edmunds is not owned and operated by a Manchester woman named Samantha. I went on the fake Edmunds escrow site to see what I could find out from the online tech support there, and decided to ask them if the site was affiliated with Edmunds. Since Im a suspicious bastard, that actually wasnt good enough for me, so I contacted Edmunds. Edmunds affiliated escrow site with the URL I was visiting. Here was my response Hi Jason, Thanks for bringing this to my attention. No, Edmunds has no affiliation with this site unfortunately, this is a fairly common scam that impacts many third party shopping sites. When these pop up, we work with our legal team to notify the appropriate authorities, but the best prevention is consumer education. We regularly update consumer advice articles warning consumers of the red flags, and our shopper support team also posts updates as well links below. Ill be sure to forward this over to our Legal team. Hope this helps, Nicole Shocking, right Of course, the whole thing is a scam to take your money and keep you from getting the cars you wanted with that money, possibly one of the worst crimes a human can commit. Nicole of Edmunds had a good point about consumer education, which is exactly why Im writing this now these sites exist, and we should all be aware of them, and not let them get away with this shit. Adding another layer of deception, the fake site provides a section where you can see their licenses. This is part of the website that, with cruel, cold irony, seeks to warn the buyer that this sort of escrow service is necessary because the internet is an uncertain, dangerous place At Edmunds, we know uncertainty doesnt feel good. You can rely on us to ensure your vehicle or payment is protected with every transaction. When your transaction happens behind the Edmunds shield, you can be certain your funds will be safeguarded by our simple payment steps. Its our job to sweat the small stuff. Well make sure your sale is safeguarded from fraud while you focus on your business. Oh, you fuckers. They do give some plausible looking licenses and credentials. The California Department of Business Oversight license is absolutely a real thing. In fact, the license number, 9. The problem is that its not issued to this site. Thats actually the license number of Escrow. Edmunds site says it will do, just without all the lying and crime. That means you can google the license number and find its valid, and related to an escrow company, which this Edmunds site claims to be. For many people, this could seem like a plausible validation of the site. So, how do you know whats real If you want to use an escrow site when buying a car, making sure the one youre working with is real can be tricky, but I think the best bets are to be a bit skeptical, and keep an eye open for details. Specifically, heres some tips Check that URL. Look at the domain name. Really look at it. Remember that a URL can have a lot of other characters that look like URLs in the string of characters that makes up the address. Take the case of this site here, the actual URL was at the end, before the final. URL is just there to confuse and make it look like a real Edmunds site www. A real Edmunds site would have separated other parts of the URL with slashes, like this edmunds. Weird looking, long, or confusing URLs can be a tipoff that something is up. Hows it look Almost all major, genuine companies that are in this business have money to spend on making their websites look just right. If things look weird or sloppy, thats usually a sign somethings up. Heres an example from this site See the sort of clumsy overlap of the semi transparent navigation window and the text box on the lower left Also, note the awkward look of that center justified paragraph in the windowNone of that would pass muster at the real Edmunds site, and sites with design that looks bit short of professional should be suspect. Be a grammar national socialist. Are there misspellings, misused punctuation, foreign spellings, or other errors Real companies dont allow that shit. I mean, we sometimes do, but thats different. On a reputable car buying site, details like this. Be wary. Play it safe. Look, this isnt buying locally brewed beer or eating bacon from the farm just outside of town. Stick with the big companies that do this sort of thing all the time. Of course, Edmunds is such a company, and this site exists, so dont be afraid to reach out. Call or email companies and ask about sites or URLs or anything youre uncomfortable with. I reached out to the owner of this fake Edmunds URL via phone and email, and have yet to receive a response. Once again, Im stunned. Be careful out there. No, Facebook Did Not Panic and Shut Down an AI Program That Was Getting Dangerously Smart. In recent weeks, a story about experimental Facebook machine learning research has been circulating with increasingly panicky, Skynet esque headlines. Facebook engineers panic, pull plug on AI after bots develop their own language, one site wrote. Facebook shuts down down AI after it invents its own creepy language, another added. Did we humans just create Frankenstein asked yet another. One British tabloid quoted a robotics professor saying the incident showed the dangers of deferring to artificial intelligence and could be lethal if similar tech was injected into military robots. References to the coming robot revolution, killer droids, malicious AIs and human extermination abounded, some more or less serious than others. Continually quoted was this passage, in which two Facebook chat bots had learned to talk to each other in what is admittedly a pretty creepy way. Bob I can i i everything else. Alice balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to Bob you i everything else. Alice balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me. The reality is somewhat more prosaic. A few weeks ago, Fast. Co Design did report on a Facebook effort to develop a generative adversarial network for the purpose of developing negotiation software. The two bots quoted in the above passage were designed, as explained in a Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research unit blog post in June, for the purpose of showing it is possible for dialog agents with differing goals implemented as end to end trained neural networks to engage in start to finish negotiations with other bots or people while arriving at common decisions or outcomes. The bots were never doing anything more nefarious than discussing with each other how to split an array of given items represented in the user interface as innocuous objects like books, hats, and balls into a mutually agreeable split. The intent was to develop a chatbot which could learn from human interaction to negotiate deals with an end user so fluently said user would not realize they are talking with a robot, which FAIR said was a success The performance of FAIRs best negotiation agent, which makes use of reinforcement learning and dialog rollouts, matched that of human negotiators. FAIRs bots not only can speak English but also think intelligently about what to say. Car Windshield Crack Repair Bangalore Days. When Facebook directed two of these semi intelligent bots to talk to each other, Fast. Co reported, the programmers realized they had made an error by not incentivizing the chatbots to communicate according to human comprehensible rules of the English language. In their attempts to learn from each other, the bots thus began chatting back and forth in a derived shorthandbut while it might look creepy, thats all it was. Agents will drift off understandable language and invent codewords for themselves, FAIR visiting researcher Dhruv Batra said. Like if I say the five times, you interpret that to mean I want five copies of this item. This isnt so different from the way communities of humans create shorthands. Facebook did indeed shut down the conversation, but not because they were panicked they had untethered a potential Skynet. FAIR researcher Mike Lewis told Fast. Co they had simply decided our interest was having bots who could talk to people, not efficiently to each other, and thus opted to require them to write to each other legibly. But in a game of content telephone not all that different from what the chat bots were doing, this story evolved from a measured look at the potential short term implications of machine learning technology to thinly veiled doomsaying. There are probably good reasons not to let intelligent machines develop their own language which humans would not be able to meaningfully understandbut again, this is a relatively mundane phenomena which arises when you take two machine learning devices and let them learn off each other. Its worth noting that when the bots shorthand is explained, the resulting conversation was both understandable and not nearly as creepy as it seemed before. As Fast. Co noted, its possible this kind of machine learning could allow smart devices or systems to communicate with each other more efficiently. Those gains might come with some problemsimagine how difficult it might be to debug such a system that goes wrongbut it is quite different from unleashing machine intelligence from human control. In this case, the only thing the chatbots were capable of doing was coming up with a more efficient way to trade each others balls. There are good uses of machine learning technology, like improved medical diagnostics, and potentially very bad ones, like riot prediction software police could use to justify cracking down on protests. All of them are essentially ways to compile and analyze large amounts of data, and so far the risks mainly have to do with how humans choose to distribute and wield that power. Hopefully humans will also be smart enough not to plug experimental machine learning programs into something very dangerous, like an army of laser toting androids or a nuclear reactor. But if someone does and a disaster ensues, it would be the result of human negligence and stupidity, not because the robots had a philosophical revelation about how bad humans are. At least not yet. Machine learning is nowhere close to true AI, just humanitys initial fumbling with the technology. If anyone should be panicking about this news in 2.