Here are 5 things you should know.
1. Many Roomba’s are now locked to a subscription, don’t buy them secondhand, it’s a scam.
iRobot, the makers of Roomba are selling some of their vacuums with no upfront cost but a $30 monthly subscription fee (for replacement parts and service). If you go to buy certain used Roombas (i7 or j7 model seems most common) you will find them for a good price but when you turn it on it will tell you it needs an active subscription. The subscription is $30 a month… to use your robot you just bought… and it will never work without a subscription. On top of that for free you could have signed up for the subscription service and they will send you a brand new, most up-to-date model Roomba. So essentially you just paid $200 for an older model Roomba on top of the $360 annual fee when you could have just paid the $360 annual fee for a new Roomba.
If you find a good price on certain used Roombas you are likely being scammed into a mandatory subscription. You could instead sign up for the subscription for the same price and get a brand new model Roomba but you will never be able to resell it.
2. Some animals “park” their babies while they go off and eat all day.
Some animals like deer and rabbits “park” aka leave their babies in a safe sheltered place like tall grass, shrubs, or shallow dens while they spend the day eating elsewhere.
What should you do if you come across a baby animal and no mama? In most cases, unless the baby is visibly injured or distressed leave it alone! You should Google the animal, read about the habits of that animal and its babies. Assuming there is no need for immediate intervention leave it for a day or so. If after that time nothing has changed then you should contact a local animal expert. If the situation seems like it needs intervention, take precautions and only intervene if you can actually help or get the baby to someone who can.
3. Most electronic safes can be opened very easily.
Electronic safes are not true security.
When buying a safe, you are balancing security vs the illusion of security. Safes with electronic combos can be opened very quickly with the right tools. The right tools cost about £153.58. Disconnecting the ribbon cable of a safe from the key code panel and plugging it into a black box will allow a new code to be saved to memory. See a box in action https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxYJqRfXNxM
That safe is actually held together by styrofoam.
Bigger safes are the same, the only difference being it can take a few mins.
When you buy a safe all you’re buying is time. That’s it. Someone wants to get in the box they will. There is no residential safe sold that can truly stop someone from getting into it. That said, mechanical safes are more secured than chip because chip safes have bypasses built into them – whereas mechanical safes require a skilled safe-cracker or destruction of the lock to open.
A lot of safe manufacturers sell you on the security of a door or how much prying it can take. That’s bogus. Safes are opened from the side or top with a grinder.
Buying a safe is always a trade-off between security and convenience. That said, this tip should help you know the difference between a manual safe that requires time or force, and an electronic one with built-in bypasses and core integrity faults. No safe manufacturer will ever tell you about these boxes, but they exist and they work very well.
4. New Airbnb scam to avoid.
An experience shared: ” A ‘supposed landlord’ sold us a tenancy agreement on a property that he never owned, but was actually owned by someone else who was just hosting it out as an Airbnb; the supposed landlord took our deposit and first month’s rent and then vanished.
Today, I and my partner were involved in a seemingly new scam involving Airbnb occupants listing Airbnb properties as rental tenancies, that I feel might be worth raising to the attention of this community.
So we were on the market for a rental property just to get us by for a few months. We stumbled across a nice little one-bed apartment local to us, it was perfect, fully furnished the lot. It was a reasonable price and offered nothing out of the ordinary that would indicate ‘too good to be true’.
A quick little backstory that we were given from the supposed landlord – will call him Greg – was that he previously had the apartment as an Airbnb and was now wanting to let it out as a more reliable income stream, hence it being furnished and having a bit of a short term stay feel about it.
We got to the place, met with Greg (the supposed landlord) who showed us around the place, he was smartly dressed and professional, still, nothing out of the ordinary and well-conducted.
We were happy with the place so we followed on to the paperwork, once again, all handled professionally… we weren’t actually expecting to go through with the acceptance so soon but since we were pretty dead set on the place, we made agreements with Greg that we would come back to him later on in the day to exchange the deposit and hand over the keys – we had to sort out a couple of last-minute finance bits before going ahead.
Well, this is where things get sketchy.
So we call Greg and arrange to meet, he said ‘hows about just doing it at the local costa’ since he was there at the time, in hindsight, slightly odd but we had done all the paperwork to this point, what was the worry, right?
We met him quickly in the car park, as by this point he had already grabbed the coffee, we sent the deposit money and the first month’s rent, in exchange for the keys that were willingly handed over after the payment went through. (To clarify, still nothing out of the ordinary since it was a registered bank we sent it to, no cash or anything, etc of course)
All excited to see the new place with keys in hand, we return to the property to see someone out door! Alarm bells rang at this point as to who on earth this was, he further explained that he owned the place and that it was rented out for a day to some who ‘checked out an hour or so ago’.
Realizing the situation, it was clear, Greg had just rented the property for a day, taken pictures of the place while staying there for the tenancy listing, and just so happened we were the first suckers who fell in the trap for it.
I feel this is not a well-known scam going by google and something worth being aware of out there. Just want to avoid anyone else getting stung by the same thing.
A wise idea would be to always check Airbnb or similar services for the location BEFORE enquiring.
Although it’s all been reported to authorities, I see little hope of us getting our money back at this point so I just hope I can save anyone else getting caught out.”
5. If you hate the new youtube search view, you can access the classic search function by adding any random filter (like setting the video quality to be HD or higher).
A new youtube search view can be absolutely a headache. By accessing the classic view, you can save a lot of time and actually discover what you wanted to discover.
