Hi there,

My name is Daniel. I am concerned you might think I only do this because I get to keep the money. You might think I don't value preserving a piece of history. Yes, I worry you might think I don't share the genuine enthusiasm for old radios.

Here is what I do, I hunt around for old radios, clean them, I do NOT test them, I put together an ad and sell them on eBay. This takes me around 3 hours per radio and I make $40 on average. I find it exciting and wish they end up in good hands with people who can restore them.

What do you wish to see in an ad for an old radio?

How should I write a good trustworthy advertisement that would satisfy your requirements?

Thank you,

Daniel

I'd class this as spam.

Either that or his geography is as good as Tanya Plibersik's. Last time I looked, Tasmania was part of Australia.

Last time I looked, Tasmania was part of Australia.

According to the Wiki, there's a Hobart in 9 states of the US, but not in California:

Hobart, Indiana, a city
Hobart, Louisiana, an unincorporated community
Hobart Township, Otter Tail County, Minnesota
Hobart, Missouri, a ghost town
Hobart, New York, a village
Hobart Township, Barnes County, North Dakota
Hobart, Oklahoma, a city
Hobart, Washington, a census-designated place
Hobart, Wisconsin, a village

CA = Canada.

... and California.

True but the forum doesn't display national subdivisions outside Australia so in this case CA = Canada.

As a matter of curiosity, I should look at his IP and find out where he is really from.

Low and behold, the IP belongs to Telstra Mobile!

That I find not unusual. It would seem by the amount of spam, phishing, fake bills & phone scams that money is a religion and if spoofing numbers etc. makes money well and good & customer service is an oxymoron.

With phone calls, I have noticed this week that I am getting calls from two Australian mobile numbers which are only a few digits out from my own number and also one from +62 418 XXX XXX which is the same as my number except the country code is different.

+62 is Indonesia but their phone numbers aren't even the same length as ours. IE: Their's are longer than ten digits, which is the standard for all Australian numbers bar special numbers.

What are the phone companies doing about it? Nothing.

Telstra has finally taken action on spam SMS: https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2022-04-07/telstra-rolls-out-scam-message-filter...

I have a long list of blocked numbers.

Several years ago Telstra did announce publicly that they had no real intention of doing anything about spoofing numbers etc.

That is fully understandable when they operate like a retailer only. The ruthless, fact where the business model is based on profit maximisation, your staff are there to make you money. That means that you as an employee, are there to maximise profit, by assisting the customer and yourself, by taking product through the cash register. T for one does not get that.

In the real word, you should take non-performing & dud items back to point of sale. That improves quality (you hope: Some can't even build a reputation,) If you take stuff back, that will tie up staff & take them away from selling and if there is too much of that: The product is removed.

With T it was basically said that they were in love with the money: Not paying non income producing people to fix that. Essentially saying we only want your money, not you. That's how their opposition flourishes.

Loyalty generates profit. ICI PLC was one I worked for where they well realised that the customer was their life & their future and as an employee, yours as well. There was no auto moronic answering machine to get rid of you; As said before a real person answered the phone, pronto day or night: They prosper. They could probably buy Telstra out of yesterdays turnover & have change.

Telstra has always been in love with money. It cracked me up many years ago when they went up hard against Hotmail with a free webmail offering. I still have a Bigpond webmail address but I have not used it for years because Telstra allowed the service to become a magnet for spam, scams, phishing and other hazardous online waste. Did Bigpond offer any countenance? Yes, for a small fee.

I mean, who in this day and age would install a mail server (bearing in mind that SMTP is one of the Internet's oldest surviving data protocols, and also one of the most insecure) and not provide it with even basic protection? Some years ago, before I had some big changes come along in life, I ran my own mail server and did so successfully for a long time. Quality Australian software and correctly configuring it were the orders of the day. It, like all mail servers, would be smashed all day, every day with relay requests from all the outsiders wanting to use my IP address and my mail server to hide the sender's identity. It didn't work for them because I did that job properly.

That server didn't permit relaying of mail (except mine) and did not let any spam in. It's sad that companies worth billions of dollars cannot do the same, or are unwilling to because it might cost them a few bob in profit on the sale of addons.

Re spoofing, I had a discussion this morning with a telcoms engineer and he said it is "dead easy" for telcos to detect spoofed phone numbers for the purposes of blocking spam, but none could be bothered. Seems it will take a regulatory order for action to be taken.

So, if enough people barrage politicians about this then maybe something would finally be done.

It is very easy. As I work at a large employer I deal with Telstra a lot forour own needs and the main one is the maintenance and upkeep of our PABX. In the past I have enquired as to how far we can go with things like disguising our extension numbers for dial out and the allowable (by any phone company) options are, a completely hidden number, the establishment's main indial number or the prefix with the extension number.

There are times when numbers have to be hidden and there are separate programming options for when an extension dials to another extension or to the outside. EG: If my extension number is 4920, I can opt to show that to the phones inside the building and hide it for calls dialled to the outside. What I can't do is have my number on Ext. 4920 show as 4921 for an outside call, but it can be done for inside calls. It is technically possible on the PABX but the carriers don't permit it.

As the building is a hospital, calls to executives are all automatically diverted to the Exec. Reception desk and announced to the appropriate executive if the call is deemed important enough during the screening process. Calls out from an executive show the reception extension number on internal CLI (calling line identifier) but show the hospital's main indial number on external CLI. This is the maximum allowable masking of phone numbers. This level of variance is only allowed because the one establishment owns all the numbers being used.

I am not tech savvy enough to know how the crooks go about masking mobile numbers. There is obviously a way but it is like anything else relating to the law - too many laws and not enough coppers on the beat enforcing them.