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Recently a Singapore based Anime distributor Odex, started serving “lawyer letters” to Anime downloaders and did so by obtaining the personal information of subscribers on Singnet and Starhub. These two ISPs were served court orders of which they had to cough up the information for Odex.

23rd August 2007, Pacific Internet, a third ISP in Singapore manage to protect their subscribers and won the case preventing their customers information to reach the hands of Odex. Pacific Internet lawyers walked out victorious and Odex was ruled out based on the following.

Only copyright owners - that is, the studios that made the anime - or an ‘exclusive licensee’ for the anime being downloaded, can take legal action under the Singapore Copyright Act.

Odex is a sub-licensee and had letters from rights owners authorising it to take action on their behalf, but the firm was neither a copyright owner or an ‘exclusive licensee’.

An exclusive licensee has the sole right to distribute a product in a certain market.”

So what did the other two ISPs do to protect their customers? Singnet, one of the largest ISPs in Singapore simply could not be bothered and submitted without contest!

It was also noted that Singnet lawyers were not present at the hearing.

I mean this goes to show how much your ISP serves you, in fact I do not find broadband prices in Singapore exactly cheap, protecting online privacy is the least your ISP can do for you but this was quite incredible to hear they did not even try to argue. Even Starhub made some arguements in an attempt to protect the interest of their customers.

This is really a PR nightmare, now with such bad press I wonder who wants to sign up with Singnet, who probably just lost customer confidence after this whole saga.

*Post based on facts provided by Online news articles.

[Source: Straits Times Article 1 , Straits Times Article 2]

Okay, It was too good to be true anyway, I’ve made a call to Yahoo! Singapore and they left me a voice mail, silly me did not pick up the phone, anyway the lady said that Yahoo! did not do any grants, and after reading up on the many users who also experienced this it’s untimately points to a scam. If I’m not mistaken many Singaporean Singtel subscribers get the message saying they won $9500 and send in particulars to claim the prize. It’s looks so real that it even has a nortorization form from a system developed by Carnegie Mellon University (if I recall correctly). Even signature authorities are said to be involved with the mail correspondents. So it’s more or less a scam.

Yahoo uses another e-mail address or domain for their e-mails and are appended with xxx@yahoo-inc.com so the e-mailer sent was from a normal yahoo account. I have no idea what they are scaming about, the scarry thing is that they even have your mobile phone number.

There are many answers from the Yahoo! Q&A but there are no replies from any of the offical Yahoo! staff as such many are left in the dark and unknowingly perhaps some personal information has already been released to the masqueraders. The funny thing is that Yahoo! has not steped out and informed any users about this breach or scam. Perhaps Yahoo! has experienced a breach where they lost their customer personal information to a hacker or maybe Singtel database was breached to allow someone to start a scam. Currently from my knowledge only Singtel users who subscribe to Yahoo! mail are affected. I have not seen any with reports on other Telcos.

If there has indeed been a scam I think it would be good if Yahoo! can step up and inform the public about this matter. Hopefully no one has been cheated yet.