Wednesday night I ordered a replacement laptop from Dell, had a confirmation email back detailing what was ordered, confirming billing address etc. Fine.
Monday morning opened up my emails, only to find 4 emails, apparently sent from Dell, each with the same send time of Friday night, yet received at various times on Saturday. Apparently the company credit card had been declined, and would I reply and contact the person named to arrange an alternative payment method? Looking more closely, I could see different fonts had been used to construct the email, and then the grammatical errors began to stand out.
Now it could be that there really is someone called Sayed Khaled working for Dell, and he really does want to help me complete my order and get the replacement computer to me. But I can't turn off the alarm bells going off in my head yet - seems far more likely Dell have been compromised in some way, and this is a scam.
I've emailed Dell using the contact information that came with the order confirmation - lets see what happens. If payment really HAS been refused then I'm sure they'll be in contact legitimately, and the worst thing I lose is a few days.
Yes, thanks you Kita - see my latest post. :-)
ReplyDeleteTyping from the new laptop. It's taking some adjustment because there are a lot more options than I recall from XP that need changing to make it work well, particularly in clamshell mode. It is quite a bit quicker than the Macbook in many respects, and the screen is very good, though I'm still waiting for MS Office to arrive (tomorrow) before I can finish the full transfer, emails and all. Having had so long on the mac, I really do wonder why no-one ever managed to fix the 'microsoft way' that a new OS is presented to the user with it's virtual trousers round its ankles instead of coming with a sensible set of defaults.
One of the other interesting things has been having to go in and change almost every setting in one set of dialogue boxes, then the same settings in a second set of dialogue boxes. Very odd.