World of Warcrack

3rd November 2009 · Filed under First Impressions, Games, PC · Tagged ,

I never thought I’d be saying this, but I have started playing World of Warcraft. I blame The Guild for making MMO’s look fun and social rather than  life consuming, addictive games played mostly by socially awkward nerds.

I say “started playing”, I “started playing” a few months ago and it’s um, consumed my life ever since. Starting to slow down a bit inbetween the seasonal events, as my main character is level 80 and all I’ve really got to do on the quest front are dailies and lower level quests to gain reputation with various factions and achievements, which can get a little boring after a while. I’m not in any guilds yet and only play with Brian, so I haven’t had a go at the higher level dungeons that’ll lead me to getting better kitted out, but I’ve started dipping my toes into the PvP side of the game which is suprisingly fun.

So my main character is Blood Elf rogue whose attacks seem to be more involved and action-y than I thought you could do with WoW (seriously, I barely looked at the game before The Guild, afraid I’d get sucked in). Surprisingly, I’m finding being sneaky and stealthy with my rogue really fun. It’s handy being able to run through places and not have to take everything out first, or vanish when it gets a bit much and save myself from dying, but I think I rely on that too much it’s making it harder to play as anything else well without accidently taking too much on.

Starting off in Morrowind & Oblivion put me off getting into RPGs because you start off so weak to begin with, and I found it really hard to get into because of it, dying all the time not really knowing what to do. I think with WoW they’ve made it easier for new players (with recent patches) so it’s not so off-putting. Even if you don’t have many skills or experience to begin with, your character is fairly matched with the creatures & enemies in the area you start in, so there’s less fights where it’s constantly “Miss. Miss. Miss. Hit for a small amount of damage. Miss. Miss. Miss. Oh look, you’re dead.”

I’m not on a full on RPG-type server, but I do enjoy playing as a member of the Horde and defending our lower level places against nobby, high-level Alliance players who come in and kill all the quest givers. I’m quite attached to being in a Horde faction :)

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Xbox Live Dashboard

11th August 2009 · Filed under Console · Tagged , , ,

I like the 360 dashboard. I like the market place and the general feel of the place. I like the availability of free videos to download and watch (like The Guild) and stuff. I think it’s safe to say I love pretty much everything about it, and more when we get the new update, but…

My Avatar

My Avatar

I don’t like the avatars. It sort of looks like me. I mean, I haven’t worn my hair that way in a while, but the fringe is the closest to how I have it. I certainly don’t wear clothes like that. Like these girls:

I’m usually wearing a t-shirt, jeans and Converse (or sub trousers for jeans when I’m in work), but unless you’re represented by a male avatar, that look ain’t for you. It’s pretty WTF,  jeans and Converse seem to be  items of clothing that very obviously unisex. The T-shirts though, probably the one item of clothing you’d expect to be different for the sexes based on avatar body shape, are mostly available for both.

Girl Gamers have complained about the poor selection of female avatar clothing before and it seems they were largely ignored and although the male avatar selection is miles better imo, general complaints that the overall selection is poor seems to have been met with the opening of a store and an end to the free items.

A lot of the full outfits are stereotypically feminine kinda like the line of thinking was the only girls who play games are the kind of girly girls who play Barbie Horse Adventures. There’s little in the way of clothes that are actually “in fashion” with any social group at the moment, with the exception of those ridiculous neon sunglasses. It’s almost as if they took ideas from 1990s teen TV shows, or recent cult Sci-Fi shows (the cheerleader outfit looks a lot like the one from Heroes…).

I loved in Fable II how my female character could be almost exactly like the male character but with breasts instead. It was great. She could be just as strong and just as tall and marry whoever she wanted. I could even dress her in “male” clothes or “female” ones (and the same goes for the male hero).  No restrictions what-so-ever. Why isn’t the avatar system like this? Why give users a system with which to express their identity online to other users and then restrict them?

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I Guess I Liked Resi5

10th August 2009 · Filed under Console, Games · Tagged , ,

Brian rented Resident Evil 5 for the 360 so we’ve been playing that lately. We’ve already completed the story (and started another play-through) on the PS3, but Brian wants the gamer points so we got it again.

First thing I noticed was how much better and easier it is to set up a proper split screen co-op game on the 360. With the PS3 we didn’t manage to get me playing under my PSN ID. I’m not sure if this was because it didn’t let me sign in as well as Brian, or we magically forgot how to do it (oddly, it’s the sme process as on the 360) despite managing to have both of us playing Little Big Planet with our IDs. Either way, when player 2 isn’t logged in, the co-op experience isn’t as good. Player 2 has little control over her own weapons and kit. She can remove and take stuff from the inventory, but it’s player 1 who has to sell everything and upgrade all the weapons (his own and player 2’s). I guess it’s like single player but with a real person instead of the AI controlling Sheva.

On the 360, with both P1 and P2 logged into their gamer profiles, any money and treasures you collect are doubled, so both players can sell them and upgrade their own weapons. This has made the game a little easier since before we were saving up and had to think more carefully about what weapons to upgrade and which ones to choose where as now I’ve upgraded both of my weapons as much as I can and still  have money left over. This also meant P2 could earn achievements for game progress as well (some games like Lego Star Wars: TCS don’t seem to reward drop-in co-op partners), but only if you play the chapter together from beginning to end. We found this out when we carried on from the first checkpoint in chapter 6-3 (where we left off, 5 seconds into the chapter…), completed the game and saw only Brian get the achievements. I was pretty annoyed at first, thinking the worst, that P2 could only properly complete the game if she played as P1 for at least the last level. but thankfully that wasn’t the case, not that it would have mattered much.

I do find it annoying how they deal with P2 when it comes the menu options outside of co-op play. It seemed to us the only way for P2 to spend the points she’d earnt in story-mode, was for P1 to sign out altogether, switching the active profile to P2 by default (making P2 P1). If two players are signed in from the start, I don’t see a need to restrict all control to P1, when in co-op mode of play both players get separate control of pretty much everything bar quitting the game.

Aside from zombies freaking me the fuck out, the controls of the previous games always looked really pants and awkward, so I never felt like playing them, on my own… RE5’s controls are kind of like Gears of War’s shooting controls, but with Netball rules turned on. It was a bit frustrating not being able to move around and shoot at the same time, but you get used to it eventually. Knife combat isn’t that hot with this restriction, but I guess it’s supposed to be for box opening or a last resort…

I really enjoy playing as Sheva. As far as female characters in games go she’s one of the better ones, certainly an improvement on Ashley from RE4… She’s obviously there to look good, just like the other two main female characters, but I was pleased to see they sacrificed her stylish get-up for her protection when you equip a melee or bullet proof vest.

As far as the story goes, it was okay. Kept me hooked so I completed the game at least, but on re-plays I’m not sat there watching all the cutscenes again. I don’t think they made it clear enough in the beginning that the virus had already infected most of the people in the town you start off in. The signs are there if you go and look for them e.g.

♥ on the road you start off on, if you take the first right it’ll set off a set piece where one townsperson is being dragged off by two others with really blood-shot eyes*, kicking and screaming;

♥ on the main road you start off on, there’s a group of men beating something in a sack who all stop and glare at you as you walk past – if you get up close you can see they all have blood-shot eyes*.

It’s not long after this that the action kicks in and you’re set upon by the zombie hoard, so it becomes apparent all the things you experienced or saw up to then were supposed to be signs of an infected town, not a normal town that suddenly has zombies somehow descend on it. I guess they did it to set the tone, build up suspense and put the player on edge as soon as they get into the game, but when I first played through it didn’t really have that effect. I just walked my character through to where we were told to go, and missed all the subtle hints, and only saw the group of men beating the sack.  At the time, it looked like they were trying to show the people who lived there as savage or hostile before infection, to increase the scariness of them as zombies, playing into the whole “Africa is big & scary” trope.  It’s not hard to see why game is getting criticism for being racist.

* I take this to mean they’re infected because when you first get attacked by a zombie, you see a normal person being infected. It shows a cut scene where his eyes bleed and go all red, and when he attacks you they’re still all red, where as all the uninfected characters don’t ever look ill and bloodshot.

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Sony Girlz

5th August 2009 · Filed under Games, Handheld · Tagged , , ,

Sony seem to be pulling a Dell with the PSP (and I was thinking of getting one too…) and their sudden realisation that girls play games as well.

KUATB there Sony…

I think it’s not as bad as Dell’s Della campaign. It at least seems to be more obviously targeting a specific subset of the female market, rather than making a mass (insulting) generalisation of the whole gender. The use of “Girlz” instead of “girls” kinda hints at this (it brings up images of the kind of girls that are or were into Bratz dolls).

One thing that’s annoying about it is, just like Dell, they’ve been rather patronising (although not as much) in describing the PSP’s features in comparsion to how they lay them out for their main target audience. I’m sure there are plenty of casual or non-gamer boys (Boyz?) out there who might appreciate a simplified run down of what features the PSP has to offer them.

Nintendo may have a few off days, but I like how they mostly keep their casual/non-gamer marketing relatively gender neutral.

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Playing Another Code: Two Memories

1st August 2009 · Filed under Games, Handheld · Tagged , , ,

I started playing AC: TM a few weeks ago and just picked it up again recently. I wasn’t sure how far through the game I actually was and it felt like I’d played it for ages, but it turns out it’s only been ~3 hours …

You play Ashley, a young girl, and you start out on a boat headed for Blood Edward Island with your aunt Jessica to finally see your father. He’s given you a DAS (which looks a lot like a DS) for your birthday and he’s supposed to tell you all about it when you get there. You have so many questions, because for the last 11 or so years you’ve believed he and your mother were dead.

There’s not a lot to do on the boat except talk to your aunt to find out more. It turns out she knew all along your father was alive, and you’re hurt that she didn’t tell you. When you get to the island, your father isn’t there to meet you, so your aunt goes to look for him, leaving you with the friendly boat captain. You can talk to him for a bit, to find out more about the island, but eventually your aunt doesn’t come back and you go off and look for her, on your own.

The game is pretty much a point and click puzzler, where the top screen of the DS displays either still image representing the area you are currently in or a close up of a scene you can interact with (when the magnifying glass is highlighted on the touch screen). The touch screen is the one you use to move around (or the d-pad), showing a to-down view of Ashley as she walks around an area or room. If she’s facing a part of the area that she can interact with, the magnifying glass will light up. If you click on this, what Ashley can “see” will be displayed as a single image in better detail, for you to investigate.

Although I don’t mind the way games like MystIII and *cough*Muppets Treasure Island*cough* are set out (2D scene for you to click around and up,down,left & right edges move to other scenes), I definitely like the way you can move around in AC:TM. It feels a lot less confined. You can use either the d-pad or the stylus & touch screen to move Ashley around the area she’s currently in, and move through doors to the next area. This makes it less of a hassle going back to past areas as you can easily see your route.

I think I finished the first play-through of the game in about 5 hours, which is a lot quicker than I expected. I say “first” because near the start of the game, you get a side mission to do while you try and make your way through the island to find your father. You meet a ghost called D, who’s lost all of his memories too. While you’re looking for items to give you more information about your father and what he’s been doing on the island, as well as key items for puzzles, you can also find items that will trigger D’s memories. If you don’t manage to help him remember everything by the end of the game, you have to start over again playing a “starred” mode of the game.

I’m not that far into my second play-through, but I can’t tell if it being “starred” actually changes anything. I think there are other things you can collect during the game too (another reason to play again), that fill in back story for either Ashley & her father, or the island in general, but the game makes it hard to find these by making certain items only “appear” or enabled when you’ve done something else further on in the game. In some respects this is kind of realistic for items you see but can’t pick up straight away. I mean, you wouldn’t just go picking up every object just in case it comes in handy, you’d more likely need something and realise you saw it somewhere else and go back to get it. With other items it seems more like a cheap ploy to extend the game playing time.

The game is split up into 6 chapters, each opening up a new area to explore with one sort of main puzzle to solve. As well as being a fairly short game, it felt really low on puzzles, it seems to be more about the story telling which I guess worked well, but I was expecting a bit more. For a game that had a lot of dialogue, I also expected it to have a way to skip repeated conversations (like Phoenix Wright had), but all you can do to speed it up is press A, and if you accidently press A one time too many, you get stuck going through it all again .. and again … 

I did like the story and idea behind the game (so much I’m keen to give Another Code R on the Wii a go), although it got a bit confusing towards the end when it all came to a head. I’m hoping this second play-through will clear up some things and I might enjoy it more now I’m used to how the game works.

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Prince of Persia – First Impressions

28th July 2009 · Filed under First Impressions, Games · Tagged , ,

Pretty much every lunch time Brian and I go to the same 3 or 4 shops: Game (main store), HMV, Game (Debenhams) and sometimes Gamestation. There’s nothing much else to do in town but I felt like a right loser when one of the guys who worked there said we were in there more than him :P I finally caved yesterday and bough Prince of Persia for the 360. I’d been thinking of getting it for a while, but haven’t played any of the other games so other things came first.

From a completely-new-to-the-game PoV, I really liked that they went for the method of telling you the controls while you were playing, rather than going through some tedious tutorial that takes you out of the game. Your character starts of in a canyon-y desert-y area looking for someone called Farrah, when you see a woman. You follow her (learning the controls as you go) and end up fighting two bad guys. Well, one of them. While your back is turned, heroically taunting the guy you fought off, she’s doing some magic mojo to get rid of the other guy. You have a short conversation with the woman where she warns you how dangerous it is hanging out where you are now, and we find out Farrah is actually a donkey. She legs it and you continue to stalk her.

I have no idea who the character I’m playing is, but he’s already coming across a little cocky and annoying. Following her lands you in some more trouble with bad guys, and eventually results in you needing your arse saved by the mysterious woman you’re stalking, as you nearly fall to your death when a great stone bridge collapses while you’re on it. She’s headed to a temple to stop some big bad, but all you can think about is loot that you lost along with your donkey. Just when she is about to do something to a seal in the temple (presumably the thing keeping this bad guy locked away safe), her dad comes in and cocks it all up, releasing him. Oops. You fight and escape but the world is now plunged into darkness and it’s up to you and this woman (Elika, a princess) to set things right.

As a completely-new-to-the-game newb, I feel at this point like I’m really thrown right into it. I think it’s because at certain points & locations you have the opportunity to advance the story more, learn a bit about Elika and what just happened, but I totally missed that in the first few places we went to. A little icon will pop up in the bottom left corner of the screen and if you press left-trigger you’ll see an in game cut scene where your character and Elika talk a bit more, and you’ll earn some easy achievements the more you do this. I’m not sure why they’ve decided to do it this way, I find that these conversations feel really out of sync with the general story as it’s played out in the game. I guess people on a second or third play-through might appreciate it (lengthy story-telling parts can get boring if you already know the story), but I don’t see how this set-up is better than having just one skipable cut scene.

Weird cut-scenes aside, I’m actually enjoying the game. It’s nice to look at, and despite me being pants at controlling the guy (Elika has had to save me so many times as I make a badly aimed jump off a ledge or push off a wall into nothing instead of running along it) I’m enjoying it and finding it easy to get into. One thing I’m a little miffed by is Elika’s behaviour when you’re clambering around. Most of the time she’ll follow behind you as you wall run up and along, grip claw down, ascend or descend cracks in walls and jump across gaps. She’ll even aid you in getting across larger gaps using the magic power she has, popping into the air as your mid-jump and flinging you across, safely to the other side. She’s obviously very capabable of getting around herself, so why is it when you’re climbing along vines she has to pop into place and hang off your back like she’s suddenly very weak and incapable? It seems pretty random, all things considered.

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New Phone: SonyEricsson C903

26th July 2009 · Filed under Gadgets · Tagged , ,

Although I’ve been tempted to buy a phone outside of a contract by the G1, I don’t think I could bring myself to spend money on a phone that expensive. Not when my provider of choice (3) has plans and decent enough phones to satisfy my current needs, for a reasonable price. I’m not swayed by all the applications that are available with the likes of the iPhone, and certainly not the novelty of a touchscreen (I couldn’t stand the fingerprints for one). I don’t need one for handheld games since I have a DS Lite which is better designed for the purpose. I don’t need a phone that’ll play MP3s because, well Creative don’t make phones, but aside from that I prefer to keep that feature separate too (and regular MP3 players > iPod on lack of iTunes alone).

The C903 has everything I need.

Aside from making phone calls and sending texts, I mostly want to use a phone for browsing the Internet, taking photos and finding out what song is currently playing in the shop I’m in :) Just like my W901i  the C903 supports Opera Mini, has an inbuilt camera (though what phones don’t these days) and has the neat little app. Track ID.

I rarely make any calls from my mobile, so the 200 minutes a month I get with my £20/mon deal are more than enough for me, and I’m yet to see if there’s anything new to the calling functionality. In the messaging section you can now see “Conversations” i.e. texts you’ve sent and the replies from the people you sent them to. They’re displayed in cute little speech bubbles and a shiny new interface with extra message options (like adding animation etc. instead of having to go into a separate menu). You can still view your message inbox the old bog-standard way though.

As for the Internet, the phone doesn’t come with Opera Mini, naturally. The browser it does have seems to be pretty much the same as all the SonyEricssons I’ve had for the last few years – pretty basic, renders non-mobile sites in its own weird way (takes all the text and images from the layout and just displays them as they appear in the code, it seems), doesn’t really let you do much on sites like Facebook etc.

First thing I did was download OperaMini which has better support for sites that like to do nifty things with AJAX and all that, but still has a few issues, and obviously there’s no Flash support. I like that I can have a full page overview, and when I’m in the portalled view of that page all the text is rearranged to fit within the screen. There’s lots of scrolling to be done, and the only complaint I’d have with my phone is the main up-down-left-right button is ridged and becomes uncomfortable after a good hour or two’s browsing…

It’s probably worth mentioning that £5 of the monthly charge is really the unlimited Internet add-on, where the definition of “unlimited” is the one unique to ISPs and mobile phone companies, and not the real definition us common people are used to. It covers 1GB a month, and despite how often I feel I use it I think I’m yet to actually go over that limit. I don’t think it covers any use of my phone as a modem for something like my netbook though, which I was a little disappointed to read.

Other applications it comes with that I like are Track ID which records a clip of music currently playing (when in a shop or a club, for example) and goes and looks up what that song is, based on the clip. I’m not sure how it does it, but there are applications for other phones (that I think you have to pay for?) that do the same, and it’s a pretty handy tool. You can save the song details or send them to your phone in a text message (I’ve done this twice and not actually checked if this bit was free, oops), or buy & download the song. There’s also Google Maps. This phone has GPS so that made GM even better when we were walking from the sorting office trying to find PC World/Maplins and then on to Brian’s when I went to pick up this beauty. Another application I was surprised to find tucked away, was a Youtube one! I don’t think my old phone had any means of playing Youtube videos (Opera Mini certainly couldn’t handle them), so I can see this coming to the rescue on any boring & lonely train journeys home.

The other main thing I use my mobile as is a camera. Now, the other phones I’ve had, had 1.5 – 2 mega pixel cameras with basic features, and the last one had no flash so it wasn’t great in anything less than bright sunlight, unless you turned night mode on which gave images a coloured noise layer to all the really dark bits of a scene. Still, they were pretty good for what I used them for- snapping pics of things I liked in shops or things I thought were funny to send back home to my family, and if the weather was good, actual pictures of wherever it was I was that looked nice.

This phone’s camera has a lot more nifty features, I think some even better than the £80* digital camera I got a year or two ago. It’s 5 mega pixels,  has 4 types of focus: auto (?), face detection, macro and infinite; has a flash (sort of) and 5 shoot modes: normal, Smile Shutter (I haven’t worked out what this does), BestPic (a mode I’ve wanted for ages that my digital camera doesn’t do!), panorama and frames. Use is exactly the same as all the other camera phones I’ve had, so no confustion there – just slide down the cover and snap away. There’s now an option to upload photos to Facebook or to other websites, along with the other ”Send” options, but I haven’t tried them out yet. I’m hoping it’ll be easier to post images to Twitpic this way, as Opera Mini tended to break a little when it came to scrolling through all the images I had in my Photos folder.

All in all I’m pretty chuffed with my phone and it seems a bit sturdier than the last one too so hopefully no breaking this one!  I can’t wait to get back into using it properly :)

*I realise this isn’t actually expensive for a digital camera…

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Addicted to Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise

18th July 2009 · Filed under Games · Tagged ,

Recently gotten addicted to Viva Pinata: TiP again. Brian got a 360 and was looking for ways to catch up to me in gamerpoints, so I reccommended the first Viva Pinata – pretty much every 5/10 minutes you get an achievement :P

TiP isn’t as free with doling out points though and watching him play got me itching to go back to all my gardens. How gutted was I when I start up the game and find my save file had been corrupted, just like my Fable II one?! I reckon this is down to me copying the saves and the game over to the new harddrive a while back, because for both games I had to re-install them in order to play the game from the HD, and all other saves I had from before, that I didn’t install to HD work fine.

So I had to start all over again. I think in terms of level I’m at the same level I was in my old game, and that only took me a day or two of play in total. I also got to be better organised this time, like work on attracting and achieving Master Romancer one pinata species at a time, then boxing up 4 for variants and any others separately if they’re needed to meet other requirements. I love the collecting aspect of the game!

The thing with Viva Pinata is it can be pretty crazy for a while;. Every so often you do something that’ll attract even more pinata to your garden, you’ve got to keep an eye out for Ruffians and Professor Pester and tame/keep out the Sour pinatas. But I’ve completed the Tour of Sour, bought the Captain’s Cutlass and built a small fence to keep Pester out (this is a glitch I think, but it works wonderfully), as well as become a Master Romancer of 18 pinatas now so I can keep them out of my garden too. It’s all very peaceful :3

I love how much better all the controls are compared to the original VP too. Getting the plant awards is much easier now you don’t have to go to Lottie’s shop to get seeds and then get fertiliser (once you plant a seed, press left on the D-pad and it brings up the fertilser menu). I’ve also made more of an effort to get wildcard pinatas this time around – I think I only forgotten to do it for the Bispotti so far. Still have to work on getting the twin pinatas achievments though, only managed to get twins with 3 that I’m an MR for…

Haven’t tried out the co-op aspect of VP: TiP yet either. Since B has started a game on TiP too, I’ll see if I can either co-op with him in one of his gardens or him in one of mine. He’s playing Lego Star Wars at the moment though, and I’m starting to get Pinata Island withdrawl :(

My old garden before it got corrupted

My old garden before it got corrupted

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Digital Britain?

16th June 2009 · Filed under Internet, Vent · Tagged , , , , ,

More like Jurassic Britain. The Digital Britain report is here and is kinda TL;DR. I skipped to page 89 where they start on how The Government is going to force all the pesky filesharers to stop sharing illegally.

It’s quite a disheartening read. Not because I think music, movies, shows and games should be free, but because it’s stamping on changes that ultimately benefit the consumers and non mainstream artists backed by Big Rich Record/Film/TV/Game companies.

They mention good side effects of illegal file sharing like Spotify under Option 1 of “Doing Nothing”, but because they can’t get VAT from that (can they?), and the Big Businesses can’t makes oodles of money out of it, they don’t want to know. Instead, they seem to have gone for Option 2, full of theory and assumptions on how it’ll affect people’s behaviour and how much money they’ll scrape back, which involves ISPs sending out letters to offenders and keeping a record of repeat offenders to pass over to the copyright holders if they come a-knocking.

Most of the costs will be put on the ISPs, which will then be passed down to the customers (0.2- 0.6% increase they predict, but colour me unconvinced), if they have any left given most ISPs market their more expensive and “unlimited” packages to (illegal) filesharers, just like PC World are doing atm.

They could have done nothing and left well alone. Side effects like Spotify and Last.fm are still in early stages. If the government stamp on illegal filesharing and force people back into the old way of buying music*, or not at all (because it’s overpriced, limited in choice and if it’s not mainstream you haven’t heard it), who will start using them? What will happen to all the artists who are getting noticed through sites like that? I don’t want to go back to the days before I discovered MP3.com and live365, when you’d only hear about a band if the record companies and radios decided it was The Next Big Thing.

* I don’t know what the film & TV equivalents are here. I can’t imagine we’d get American shows as up-to-date as we do now, if people weren’t downloading them when they’re shown in America. Ugh, just imagine going back to the days of getting the “new” series of Lost 2-3 years after it’s been shown in America.

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O2 Stink

27th March 2009 · Filed under Oops · Tagged , , , , , , ,

Found out today for the second time within a year, I’m a victim of Debit/Credit Card fraud.

The first time it happened was last year:

Tweets from last year

See, I’d recently bought some socks from the website WeLoveColors*and my payment required conversion to dollars (ISTR they didn’t take PayPal so I used my card…) which it seems was done by this company Easy-Forex, or had something to do with them.

A couple of weeks later I had a few missed international calls and a message from Easy-Forex asking me to call them back (sure thing, I’ll just call you back on your Portuguese number from my mobile in the UK shall I?). They didn’t say what they wanted and at the time I didn’t know who they were, so I thought “Cold Callers” and ignored it. It was only a few days later, when I checked my bank account (♥ online banking), that I noticed they’d taken $25 and $500 from my account (and I’d been charged £3 for the conversion)! That was over a month’s pay at the time, and being a “poor student” I was scared.

I printed off my statement, highlighted the transactions and headed down to Halifax as soon as I could. They were vey nice about the whole thing and cancelled my card straight away and sent me a new one. I had to come back in a few days later to fill out some fraud claim forms, give consent for the police to investigate etc. so they could give me the money back. After getting the money put back into my account (except the £3) and my new card, I didn’t hear anything about it, so I don’t really know what went down.

So nearly a year later and it happens again. Luckily, nowhere near the same amount of money and no conversion charges involved :) A few days ago, Halifax rang home. They didn’t say what about, but my Mum told me they usually ring if there has been suspicious activity on the card. Online banking to the rescue! I check my account and find a transaction for o2 Prepay in Slough for £30, on the 25th.

Although I have a contract with 3 and am definitely not with o2, I was unsure it wasn’t related to getting a BT line (since O2 and BT used to be linked or whatever), so I hit google and searched to see if anyone else had this problem.

♥ 8-page thread on MoneySavingExpert from the start of September last year. Highlights:

i had this on my credit card a few months ago with vodaphone top ups. the credit card company phoned me about 6 transactions that had gone through in an hour.

6 transactions within an hour?! Not O2, but surely the phone companies would find the same card being used 6 times to top up phones (even if different numbers) just a little bit suspicious?

With regards to O2 topups, if you topup by phone or on their website you need to provide the address details of where the credit/debit card is registered before it will go through, so it looks like someone somewhere may have access to more than just your card numbers…

I was wondering what they could do to prevent such scams, seeing as it has happened a lot and is still happening. What more should people have to provide before they can use a debit card (not at an ATM) to top-up their phone? How about making customers register a card against their phone number/account and only let them use it if they have verified it’s them who owns it (i.e. they give relevant details like the branch associated with the account so the bank can verify and photo-ID)?

It shouldn’t be all on the banks to prevent such things happening – it’s obviously happening so much Halifax have a flag on that kind of transaction, and I’ll bet other banks do too. What are O2 et al doing?

This has happened to me a year ago on my MBNA credit card. It was cancelled, the charges refunded and a new card issued. It’s now happened again exactly a year later on the new card. When I rang MBNA today to report it – the guy said straight away “is it the 02 payment” so they’re obviously getting lots of them. I don’t know where these people are getting my details from but at least MBNA are good at dealing with it.

That’s nearly a year and a half ago. Way to go O2, you won’t be making a customer out of me…

If you are worried that a mobile company has your details then you need to use the Data Protection Act to find out what records they hold on you. Have a look on the Information Commissioners website on how to do it. http://www.ico.gov.uk/

This seems like a useful bit of information. I’m not sure what would turn up now though, if the bank get the police involved. It’s always handy for the future, if I want to know what other companies might have on me.

I had a mobile phone bought from O2 last year, the same people attempted to buy a camera from another site but my bank stopped them. They said that O2 is a well known company for getting cards scammed by. Apparently they dont ask any security questions. So why the hell dont the banks fine them for allowing this to happen?

I’m wondering this too. I’ve had payments not go through on Amazon and Game because of failed security checks. They told me, if this happens in store they’ll ask you and you get to answer, but there’s no way for it to go through online so they just cancel the transaction. Maybe O2 have the same couldn’t-give-two-shits-about-potential-customers attitude BT have.

Anyone thought of contacting Watchdog over this? Im sending them a link to this thread.

My mum said the same thing, and someone later posted a link. I might e-mail them with a link to that thread asking about it if I can’t find any evidence of them having done something on it.

been told now when you try to top up by debit/credit card by phone on 02 pay as you go its harder to top up they ask now for issue no. which most cards dont have and you cant top up without it ..

This post was from December, and it isn’t really good news – quite a few online stores ask for issue number as well, so if your details have been stolen from such an online transaction, O2 asking for issue number is no use, just further “proof” that the fraudsters are you.

Best link I’ve found in that thread so far is to this page, which has loads of information regarding this BT Cellnet/O2 scam. From reading that, it looks like it goes a bit deeper than just fraudsters nicking your details – it looks like O2 really couldn’t care less about the victims of said fraudsters. Why would they? It’s not O2 losing money – infact, they’re getting it – it’s the banks! Absolutely disgusting. And here’s another thread with victims of O2 from around the same time.

I have to say, Halifax were wonderful this time around too. I went in, told them what happened and the nice lady had me fill out a form straight away. I checked my account when I got back to work and found they had already put the money back in. I guess it happened quicker this time because of how often this O2 scam happens. I don’t see why the banks don’t get the money back from O2 though, or maybe they do. It would be crazy if they couldn’t touch O2 at all – I mean, surely the banks are bigger than some shitty mobile phone company?

I doubt I’ll hear anything more from Halifax or the police on the matter, and there’s no point in contacting O2, but if I do I’ll post more on the matter.

Fuck you O2.

* If you’re looking for proper knee-length or over-the-knee socks in all sorts of colours, I wouldn’t bother with this site. They’re made out of tights material rather than normal sock material. I was sorely disappointed. I just wear mine over black socks/tights with boots.

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