Just a few useful words to explain todays match vs England to Chinese friends :

Wembley – 温布利

football – 足球

referee – 裁判员

England －　英国

big classic match – 十大经典决赛

We want revenge for 1966 – 我们要为1966复仇

Here is a short summary of the most popular methods

• cheap branded articles or electronic articles are offered on online shops with a very professional layout. The support seems to be great, too. The contact happens via phone, skype, email. The prices of the products are often just 30% of the marked price in Europe or the US. After you did the payment, the scammer will ask for another payment, using some excuse like the goods are hold back by the customs. Or the special offer suddenly expired or their supplier needed more money. Whatever.  If you paid per Western Union, there is normally no way to get your money back. You wont find any company under the address mentioned in the imprint of the website.
• Domain registration is also very popular scam. You will get a message by an “official domain name registrar” who received a request by a company who wants to register a domain name like “your-company-name.cn” or “your-company-name.cn.com”.  Just move those mails into your spam folder. Their only goal is to sell you an overpriced domain registration with their company
• Forwarding payments or goods to China: This is also very popular. A Chinese company seeks represantatives in several countries. Your job as representative will be to accept payments by their customers and forward them to China. Of course they will never delier any goods. They just need your account to create trust because many of their customers will hesitate to transfer money directly to China. You will get paid by cheque. The cheque is a counterfeit. Or sometimes they will ask you to accept orders of goods and forward them to China. They do not pay those goods and after a few weeks you will get trouble with the supplier
• Sudden contacts to potential business partners: A Chinese company contacts a western company and invites them to negotiations about a huge contract to China. They will ask you to pay for hotel fees, food, give them expensive presents. After the “negotiations”, they will suddenly disappear.
• Sales of academic titles: You can “buy” them online or even at the side entrances of universities in China. Those titles are worthless of course, even if you do some “academic work” to get them.
• Orders per cheque: A Chinese company contacts a Western supplier and orders goods. Payments will happen with counterfeit cheques from third parties (who have no idea about any payments). Sometimes the bank clerk will credit the cheque and the goods are delivered. After a while the third party will bounce the cheque and your goods are lost.

I am curious about the reaction in Japan. I used to live together with a Japanese when I was studying in China 10 years ago. According to him, the massacre in Nanjing happened. But the Japanese army had no choice than shooting civilians because Chinese resistance was disguised as civilians. And Chinese exaggerate the number of the people killed there because Nanjing even did not have 300.000 inhabitants.

Well, after a while I really stopped discussing topics like this with him. But in Japanese history, the Nanjing massacre does not play a big role, its sometimes not even mentioned in schoolbooks. Japanese counted their own dead but somehow forgot to count the dead of the Chinese army and civilians during the war. Before they left they also destroyed lots of evidence.

It has a new interface for admin panel and I think it’ll take sometime before I get used to it. The upgrate-function of wordpress is great, one click and its done if you dont make any manual changes.

We postponed this for some time, but now I also upgrated the theme of wordpress and its finally possible to handle widgets in the sidebar.

Typo3 is a bit annoying because you often have to update the extensions and sometimes change the extension-templates after updates. Fortunatly we did not too many changes in the source-code.

Chinese New Year – Part II.

Beijing really gone crazy – unbelievable

Beijing welcomes the Year of the Rat! Enjoy this video taken in Beijng.