Choosing what pictures you put up on Facebook must be a very tough choice.

I mean here is a site that many many millions of public people have access to on a daily basis.

It’s almost like you’re choosing what picture to put on a giant billboard.

I chose mine very very carefully and picking the most simple picture that can’t go wrong.

But I guess the guys at Facebook saw that coming so they were a little smarter than that. They allowed your Facebook Friends to upload pictures of YOU and tag you so your friends could see them.

So what you get are people uploading unflattering pictures of me like this one here.
So anyway, I started paying some attention to the pictures that some of my friends put on their Facebook profiles.

There are some who go for the “CUTE CUTE” poses.

Some who go for the very EMO poses

Some who do funny poses.

There are even some who go for the very SERIOUS BUSINESS LOOK.
FUWAH!!! DON’T PLAY PLAY!!!

And there are some who just go for the poses that say a lot about their character.

This friend of mine also known as Boss Lepton, loves food so his only Facebook profile picture is of him eating.
Then just yesterday PinkPau showed me a random Facebook of this other Malaysian girl.

At first I thought her pictures were not very different from the other Facebook pics.
Then they got a little different from what we’re used to seeing.

and then even more different…

And more different…

and finally…

HOLY SHIT!!!
AND EVEN BIGGER HOLY SHIT!!!
Now this just makes all our other Facebook pictures lame.

*Sniff*

Time for me to update my profile picture.

For some of you who have been following my blog for the longest time, you would know that one of my best friends in the world is this Middle-Eastern dude named Hasan whom I spent 3 years with in London.

Hasan is now working in the Middle-East and earning in a month what many Malaysians earn in a year. As a result of that he’s always going for holidays and always trying to drag me with him but so far I haven’t been able to find the time to go.

Just recently we’ve been exchanging e-mails and here’s how the conversation kinda went.
*After forwarding him an e-mail that our UCL Alumni was having a gathering in Kuala Lumpur*

Me: Another reason to come to Malaysia dude. Hopefully a good enough one. Hahahaha.

——————————–

Hasan:

Mr. Timmy Tiah, No! I refuse. I’m very very tempted, but until you show your ugly face here in Bahrain I’m not coming to Malaysia. Final! Old man now huh? But hey, at least you’ve achieved something.

A lasting friendship with one of the coolest and smartest guys around, me.

Happy belated birthday buddy. I would buy you a new camera but apparently you get them for free now.

What to get the man who has everything? Wanna go Hawaii? Your bestest bud in the whole wide world, Hasan
——————————–
Me: Hawaii? You wanna go Hawaii? I don’t mind. Or lets go to California!

——————————–

Hasan: Okay, how about we go california and hawaii? early august? 2 weeks
——————————–

Me: Hey I’m have to go to Canada in July for my cousin’s wedding so 2 weeks in August is way too long for me. I have to work. How about we make the trip in December, near the end of the year and when the recession we’re all expecting finally comes, I may have less work to do then.

——————————–

And his reply to that

“Bah, what recession, there is a boom like never before here my friend. I love oil at $130.”

——————————–
Me:

You bastard! When I get enough time and money one day, the next business I go into is going to be in alternative energy. By the time us alternative energy entrepreneurs are done, crude oil will be so cheap you guys in the Middle-East are going to be giving us Buy 2 Barrels FREE 1 Barrel offers!!!
and and… by the time we’re done.. we’re going to have cars that run on SHIT!… in fact.. by then it’ll be shit that costs $130 per barrel…

*sigh*

I know I know… easier said than done to quell our thirst for oil but oh well….

The irony is… while many of us in this part of the world suffer from the increase in oil price, the other net exporting oil countries boom!!!

Okay so the petrol prices just recently went up and we’ve all been urged to change our lifestyle to cope with the change.

According to an article I read in The Star, apparently only 16% of Malaysians take public transport.

That’s shocking! I mean when I was in London, almost everyone I knew took public transport but fair enough, I’m ashamed that I’m one of the 84% of Malaysians that don’t take public transport.Prior to this the only times I take public transport is when I try to escape the jam. Like after work on Fridays, instead of trying to fight the jam out of the city, I take a Monorail to Pavilion to watch a movie.By the time my movie is done, the jam has gone from this

to this
It makes a big difference.

But I never take public transport to go where I need to go. *Sigh*

I’m just drive.

So today I had a few meetings all around the city and I decided that I was going to take public transport or walk to my meetings. My first meeting was a lunch meeting with a client at KLCC and just before I was about to leave… heavy rain struck.

And when I say heavy rain… I mean HEAVY RAIN!!!
I quickly saw it as an opportunity to justify me taking the car but I decided that NO… I have to be true to myself.

So I went down to my car, grabbed my umbrella and started walking to the nearest LRT Station with Robb who was coming with me for the meeting.

Just before I left the office, Yee Hou asked Robb
“Eh raining… do you need to borrow my Ela Ela Eh Eh…”The things some of my colleagues think about sometimes. (Ela Ela Eh Eh = Umbrella … think Rihanna).

So okay armed with my umbrella I was on my way.

The thing I noticed about walking is… that you really get to see everything when you walk.

From the messed up empty lots

to the disgusting giant monsoon drains that I’m sure is radioactive at some point.

Walking around KL City was a lot harder than the walking around I did in London.

For one, the roads here were a lot broader than the ones in London so cars here went really really fast.If I earned RM0.50 for every time a car nearly ran me down while I was crossing the road, I would be a very rich man today.

Not too long later, after stepping on a lot of puddles I finally reached a bridge that was going to take me to the Dang Wangi LRT station.Simple stuff.

All I had to do was go and buy a ticket from one of these machines costing me RM1.30
Then head over to the trains.

Then it was time to let the waiting begin.

I must’ve seen two trains on the other side past before mine finally came and before I knew it….

Taddaaaaa I was on board.

Not too crowded a train even for lunch hour.
And soon enough, we were at KLCC.

The whole trip cost me only RM1.30 and took me just as much time as it would have taken me to drive there and park my car.

Not to mention parking at KLCC would easily be something like RM10 after the many hours I’ve spent there and around the nearby buildings for my meetings.So there you have it.

Malaysian public transport is not entirely useless.

It works… it just needs a wider network.

After the client meeting I went to the office of one of our Nuffnang law firms to meet one of the partners there.

Seeing my umbrella he asked
“Did you walk here?”

And I said
“Yes… times are bad… couldn’t afford to fill up my car so I decided to walk instead”.

Then he said
“HAIH!!! I was thinking of charging you a bit more for this thing we just did for you because we had to put some extra time into it but okay lah… since you so poor thing”.

I gave him Bambi eyes.

SEE!!! I SAVED A LOT OF MONEY TODAY BY WALKING AND TAKING LRT!!!

Okay so last weekend I was at The Curve again.

What else is new right? I’m at The Curve just about every other week.

While I was there last weekend there was this F&N event going on in front of Cineleisure with 4 or so huge cans for street artists to paint on.

I think it was just the finales for a contest to find the individual with the best art but looking at the cans I had a thought.

Again perhaps I’m too much a person intrigued by user-generated content, but wouldn’t it be cool if F&N or something came up to the public and said

“Hey.. we’re coming up with a new drink, design the can for us and the one with the best design will win”.

If I were good in art, I would soooo go for it.

Imagine stopping by 7-11 with a few friends then picking up a can of F&N whatever, and saying to your friend
“Dude… I designed this can”.And how much better if they even let you NAME the new drink.

It can be anything… heck if you can even name the drink after yourself. I’ll call mine “Tim Juice”….

Then again maybe that sounds a little wrong.

But alas… that’s all wishful thinking for now. Yet there were some pretty cool cans there.

My favourite is this one.

I like that white evil dolly thing with the big head.

Anyway on another note last night I was out with some friends for dinner at this Middle-Eastern restaurant in Le Meridien.

And guess what… apart from all the great food (couscous and all.. mmm I love couscous) THEY HAD A BELLY DANCER THERE!!!

An actual belly dancer from the Middle-East!!!

Apparently if you’re a restaurant you need some kind of permit to hire a belly dancer to dance for your patrons but that was some really cool stuff.

The 6 of us on the table were having a serious conservation when suddenly this belly dancer showed up. All of us lost focus instantly and stared helplessly at her belly that was moving up and down.

Suddenly whatever work or business we were talking about didn’t matter anymore…

Then at one point the belly dancer actually came up to one of my colleagues and dragged him up to dance with her. I recorded a video of that but I shall spare him the embarrassment.

Hahaha it was enough that the 30 people in the restaurant saw that…

Dinner was expensive though.. burnt a hole through all our wallets but I guess belly dancers aren’t cheap.

PS: Today’s Father’s Day!!! Happy Father’s Day Dad!!! This is the day I apologize to my dad for being such a rascal growing up.

Okay so last weekend I was at The Curve again.

What else is new right? I’m at The Curve just about every other week.

While I was there last weekend there was this F&N event going on in front of Cineleisure with 4 or so huge cans for street artists to paint on.

I think it was just the finales for a contest to find the individual with the best art but looking at the cans I had a thought.

Again perhaps I’m too much a person intrigued by user-generated content, but wouldn’t it be cool if F&N or something came up to the public and said

“Hey.. we’re coming up with a new drink, design the can for us and the one with the best design will win”.

If I were good in art, I would soooo go for it.

Imagine stopping by 7-11 with a few friends then picking up a can of F&N whatever, and saying to your friend
“Dude… I designed this can”.And how much better if they even let you NAME the new drink.

It can be anything… heck if you can even name the drink after yourself. I’ll call mine “Tim Juice”….

Then again maybe that sounds a little wrong.

But alas… that’s all wishful thinking for now. Yet there were some pretty cool cans there.

My favourite is this one.

I like that white evil dolly thing with the big head.

Anyway on another note last night I was out with some friends for dinner at this Middle-Eastern restaurant in Le Meridien.

And guess what… apart from all the great food (couscous and all.. mmm I love couscous) THEY HAD A BELLY DANCER THERE!!!

An actual belly dancer from the Middle-East!!!

Apparently if you’re a restaurant you need some kind of permit to hire a belly dancer to dance for your patrons but that was some really cool stuff.

The 6 of us on the table were having a serious conservation when suddenly this belly dancer showed up. All of us lost focus instantly and stared helplessly at her belly that was moving up and down.

Suddenly whatever work or business we were talking about didn’t matter anymore…

Then at one point the belly dancer actually came up to one of my colleagues and dragged him up to dance with her. I recorded a video of that but I shall spare him the embarrassment.

Hahaha it was enough that the 30 people in the restaurant saw that…

Dinner was expensive though.. burnt a hole through all our wallets but I guess belly dancers aren’t cheap.

PS: Today’s Father’s Day!!! Happy Father’s Day Dad!!! This is the day I apologize to my dad for being such a rascal growing up.

For those of you who don’t know, last night… courtesy of Hong Leong Online, 100 Nuffnangers were invited to an 8-Course dinner at the JW Marriott, just before a premier screening of the movie Made of Honor, a movie that’s only coming out in 1-2 weeks time.When I first got there (I was a little late being stuck in the jam on the way there), everyone was already mingling around.

It’s easy to spot the 100 Nuffnangers in the crowd. Really easy.

All you gotta do is look for a bunch of guys and girls each with cameras in their hands and each taking lots of pictures of each other.

And when group pictures are being taken, it’s always a case where right after the first picture is taken, one or two more people picture say
“Wait wait.. one more.. with my camera”.And occasionally you hear someone say
“Aiyah no need already lar.. I send to you my picture”.

And the typical reply to that is
“No lah!! You never send me wan!!!”

Everyone was looking their best.

It was really really nice to see everyone dress up.

All the guy Nuffnangers dressed up in their suits looking their best and all the girl Nuffnangers dressed up in the most beautiful dresses looking as hot as ever.

We soon got started with our 8-course menu and dinner flew by really really quick.

They say time really flies when you’re with good company… I couldn’t agree more.

Okay this has got to be the quickest blog entry I have ever had to write since I gotta run off for a meeting now so I’m going to leave you guys with a few pictures of some of the pictures from last night.

I just realized that I didn’t take as many pictures as I hoped that night. Missed out taking pictures with own camera with quite a number of Nuffnangers there.

After dinner we headed off to watch Made of Honor. I was among a bunch of girls who were all drooling over “McDreamy”.

Ish…

What a wonderful night.

I’m going to begin this entry with how Project Trafford came about.

You see, Nuffnang has in the past run many many many campaigns for all our different clients and this is how it typically works.

Some people from the client, the advertising agency and Nuffnang will sit together in a room to brainstorm to come up with an idea.

These brainstorm sessions can last from a few hours to even the entire day. I had one brainstorming session that lasted from morning throughout the late afternoon and lunch was just some McDs Delivery that we ordered.

One day I was at a marketing seminar and the speaker there was talking about the phase of Web 2.0. Now what Web 2.0 essentially means is instead of content being generated by the content providers, it is not generated by users. Blogs, Facebook, YouTube thrive on mostly user-generated content and fall into this category.

Then there was the case study we were shown where in the USA, the most expensive TV spot in the world ie the 30 second commercial for the Superbowl was given to the public to create their own ad and air it.

Of the many many people who created their own homemade ads for the brand, one of them got selected and this is what that person came up with for something like USD12.
That’s right… no camera crew, no professional actors, no nothing. Just a video camera and a home computer.

I got inspired by this one case study. So I went to one of our clients and said
“Hey… why not.. instead of us pretending to understand what bloggers and blog readers wanna read, why don’t we help put them in groups to work together to come up with something”.

It was something we had never done before, and in all fairness it could work or not work… but fortunately the people at Mister Potato were open to trying it out.

What we did was put 40 bloggers in 8 groups, each with a group leader.

My group had two group leaders because well.. I had to have a backup in case I was sent overseas for work or something during the week we were supposed to get something done.The Mission: The use our blogs as a medium to promote the upcoming Mister Potato Football Contest where 30 people will stand a chance to win a trip to Old Trafford to watch Manchester United play.

All you have to do is collect points from all the Mister Potato packs you buy to munch and even if you didn’t get to win the trip to Old Trafford, you could still stand a chance to win monthly prizes of some football jerseys.

My group members were if anything proactive to the max!!!

They were excited about the idea and one of them even took the liberty to put together a Google Group for us to share our ideas online (since well.. many of us aren’t geographically near each other).
The first thing we explored was… what each person was good at doing and here’s what we found.

One of my group members, Cedric was good in photoshop.Another Hwei Ming was good at photography.

Another Sidney, was good at BAKING.

Another Joe, was very into the local celebrity scene.

So we thought… hey why not have Sidney bake some little sugar dolls of each of us, have Hwei Ming take pictures of them in different angles and then have Cedric photoshop all of them into a comic strip.

And to add a bit more spice to the comic strip, let Joe bring in a local celebrity into the comic strip.

The rest of us along with Joshua and Jason worked on the ideas for the storyline.

The result… well.. you guys be the judges.
And yes… that IS Hannah Tan… 😛

We have Joe to thank for that.

If you guys wanna win a trip to Old Trafford, click here.
*And yes… my group is probably the only one of 8 groups with ALL GUYS IN IT. Ishh.. Robb!!!

Birthdays in Nuffnang is a really special thing.

We have a rule in the company that nobody is allowed to come to work on their birthdays.

Everyone automatically is required to take the day off on their birthday, a day off that is not deducted off any annual leave.

My birthday however was a little different.
I woke up in the morning like any other day and went to office in the morning. It was my birthday and I at least wanted to spend half a day with the people that mattered to me ie all my colleagues at Nuffnang that I see every other day.

I also had a meeting on that day.

Two weeks ago, one of my clients scheduled an important meeting in KLCC that happened to coincide with my birthday.

I was a little cautious the morning I walked into the office on my birthday because I kinda knew that the Nuffnang team was planning something for me.I discovered their plan by accident.

The week before when one of my colleagues were out of the office, I went over to his computer to make sure he sent an e-mail out to a client or not, an e-mail he was supposed to CC me but I didn’t get. There I saw an e-mail that said “Boss’s Birthday”.

I was tempted to open it, but I decided not to spoil it for everyone (including myself), so I left it as it was and didn’t tell anyone about it.

But I knew they were planning something (I had intended to keep my birthday quiet but I guess Facebook gave me away).
So in the morning I was on FULL ALERT.

And true enough, the surprise turned up.

One of them asked me a little later in the morning
“Did you see your blog? There’s a surprise there for you”.

I went in and I saw that my leaderboard ad unit on top of my blog had a little birthday banner on it. I smiled and said “Thank you everyone”.

Then I turned on to ask one of my colleagues
“Am I getting paid for this ad?”

Then later on in the morning while I was on the phone with a client, we received a delivery from one of our very nice clients. A string of balloons tied on a basket with a nice card and chocolates.

I was happy. Enough surprises for the day. I thanked everyone, including the people who sent the balloons and I rushed off for my meeting at KLCC next.

The meeting was scheduled for 12.30PM but my client wanted to meet me a little earlier to buy me a birthday lunch at San Francisco Steakhouse there at 11.30AM.

At first I said “No need lar.. not much time left also.. we go Food Court can already”.

But my client said
“What?! It’s Friday!!! Do you know packed KLCC Food Court is on Friday lunch hour ?”

So fine we went to San Francisco Steakhouse.

As I sat down, she looked at me and said “I have some bad news for you. Apparently the CEO of the company has just decided to cut all advertising on blogs for whatever reason.

This company that my client represented was one of the largest ad spenders in the country and it had taken us the longest time ever to actually rope them in as a client of Nuffnang and now they were telling us that they were cutting all spending on blogs.

I was shocked but still not too worried since Nuffnang fortunately isn’t dependent on one big client for its survival.

Probably seeing that I wasn’t worried enough, she added more salt on to the wound.
“They’ve decided that not only are they going to cut all future ad spending on blogs but also cancel all the current campaigns that are running now”.

That was when I started to panic. How do I go up to all our bloggers who were supposed to participate in a campaign that is running now and tell them that “Oops.. sorry, client changed their mind”.

My mind raced for solutions and at that point, all I wanted to do was get out of that damn lunch and back to the office to do some damage control.
Then suddenly from behind me, I heard a small crowd sing
“Happy Birthday to you…. Happy Birthday to youu….”

See how surprised I was!
I turned behind to see some of my other clients, friends and the Nuffnang team from our KL and Penang office walking towards me with a cake. The first thing I did was turn back to my client and asked
“WOI!!! SO REAL OR NOT WAN?!?”

She smiled and said
“No it’s just a joke… we just wanted to make you really sad before we surprised you”.

For someone who was expecting some sort of surprise, I really really didn’t see that coming and I guess it felt so real for me because they managed to get my clients in on the game with them. ISH!!!

Well done guys… a very good surprise.

We had a nice lunch and I took the rest of the day off. I went to The Curve (Duhh.. my favourite hangout place) to watch Kung-Fu Panda and then came back into the city for a dinner I had with a few good friends and clients at Michaelangelo at Pavilion.
It was at that point when I realized that I am indeed the luckiest man in the country.

It’s not because I’m part of what is the fastest growing internet and most exciting internet company in the country nor because I love my work… but because many of the people I work with today, be it the bloggers, clients or colleagues… all are the very best of my friends, something that I most certainly can’t take advantage of.
After dinner ended that night, I headed off to Poppy to meet some other friends to dance the night away, waking up the next day to have another small dinner with Kenny Sia and Ringo who had just gotten back from Bali.

To all my dear friends… from those who were there to celebrate with me to those who were kind enough to leave me wishes online or via SMS, thank you for being such a wonderful part of my life.

And finally to Kenny, Ringo and PinkPau who had planned another small surprise for me the day after, thank you.
I am now 24 years old.

See? They even got me a behloon for my birthday.

Remember about a year ago I wrote about a soft drink called “Anything”and “Whatever in Singapore?

And then remember shortly after that how I grabbed myself a number of those drinks while in Singapore?

Dammit… I loved the drink and I was only wondering when they would actually start selling it in Malaysia.

Guess what?As of this week… IT’S HERE!!!

ANYTHING WHATEVER IS HERE!!! You can find it everyone in stores now in all the 7-11s around and all.

I just can’t get over the novelty of the drink and the actual flavours are damn nice. I especially love the root beer in “Anything”.If it’s your first time hearing of the drink Anything/Whatever. It’s basically a soft drink where you don’t know at all what you’re gonna be getting when you buy it, each can is like a little bag of surprises.

It could be ice-lemon tea, peach tee, jasmine tea, cola or whatever. Apparently in the coffee shops in Singapore, people actually guess what flavour is in the can and bet over it.

Lol.. people will gamble over anything these days.

Anyway, you know what the best part is. When they came to Malaysia they were looking for 2 media partners to do market the brand and increase their exposure.

They got MSN which runs ads on Hotmail, Live Spaces, MSN Messenger and etc etc.

And guess who the second one is…. NUFFNANG.

BWAHAHAHAHA

So a few days ago I went for the Press Conference of their launch.
I met the Founder of Anything/Whatever, the man on my right in this picture.

Heck when I was first introduced to him I nearly went
“OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG!!! I’M SUCH A BIG FAN OF YOUR DRINK”.

But I had to maintain my cool so I just went
“Hi… I’m Timothy Tiah, nice to meet you.”

I was talking to him so much about his drink that at one point he even went
“How do you know all this?”

And I replied
“I’m a big fan of your drink so I did a lot of research”.

There were other people there too.

There was Rene from Media 2.0, the rep for MSN in Malaysia who is standing on my right, and to his right (in the middle) is Jeremy from Tongee, one of the people responsible for bringing Anything/Whatever in.

Turns out I have a LOT in common with Jeremy but I’ll indulge in that later on.

Anyway, soon enough we all sat down to address the press.
Jeremy from Tongee started off with the opening speech. All of us in the panel were supposed to give a speech to the press.

Everyone prepared scripts and all but I foolishly again decided to WING IT!!!

And the problem with “Winging It” ie going without a script is my fear of saying something wrong.. like “Nipples” again.. or something.

But no it went well. I told the story of how I first found out about Anything/Whatever, how I watched their TV ads on YouTube many many many many times because I thought there were hilarious,

and how I was very grateful to have the opportunity to work with such a great brand along with MSN, one of the biggest media owners in Malaysia.
After we were all done giving our speeches, we all opened our can of Anything/Whatever each to officiate the launching of the drink in Malaysia.

Here’s the funny thing about the drink.

Anything is a random selection of carbonated drinks and Whatever is a random selection of non-carbonated drink.

Shortly after having our drinks, Rene from MSN asked me
“Hey man, I’m drinking Whatever now and looking at their flavours and I still can’t tell what I’m drinking”.

I guess that was the fun of in it. As Rene said in his speech earlier
“For someone who makes decisions on a daily basis, it is refreshing to once have something decided for you”.

(Or at least that’s something along the lines that I remember him saying).

I went home that day really really happy.

Happy because here’s a brand that I had long been crazy about a year ago since I heard about it… and now we actually have a chance to work with them.

I owe thanks to Jeremy and Nicholas for this.

Thanks guys.

Check out their website here.

I like the cute little music their site plays.

About a week ago, a very nice fellow Nuffnanger wrote me an e-mail about how things when sometimes sound too good to be true… really are.

I just want to share it with everyone else so you don’t fall into the same trap ok?

PS: She requested in the end that I change her name if I were to post this up so… lets just call her Sharon.

Hello there Timothy, Firstly allow me to introduce myself. I’m Sharon , an avid blog reader of yours and I really see great potential in you. I’m having some really big problem here and I don’t know who else to turn to apart from you. This is going to be long, but I hope you stay patient with me. 🙂

Here’s how the story goes:

First of all, I was at Dawn’s Yang page (www.xanga.com/clapbangkiss) and i spotted an advertisement that she put above her header. I’ve attached a picture of it as well. The advertisement is regarding the Designer Luxury Brand (http://www.designerluxurybrands.com/), and which girl wouldn’t have clicked on it having seen Louis Vuitton and Gucci at 30-70% discount, which obviously was what I did.

The next thing I know, I was signing up for their membership as well as browsing through their items.They sent me an email, of which I’ve attached the email content: “Dear Ms. Ong,

We welcome you to Designer Luxury Brands.

You can now take part in the various services we have to offer you. Some of these services include:

Permanent Cart – Any products added to your online cart remain there until you remove them, or check them out.

Address Book – We can now deliver your products to another address other than yours! This is perfect to send birthday gifts direct to the birthday-person themselves.
Order History – View your history of purchases that you have made with us.
Products Reviews – Share your opinions on products with our other customers.

For help with any of our online services, please email the store-owner: shop@designerluxurybrands.com.

Note: This email address was given to us by one of our customers. If you did not signup to be a member, please send an email to shop@designerluxurybrands.com.”

The even added me on MSN. That gave me more confidence because there was life support to guide me through my shopping and whatnot. When I’m done with my browsing, I decided, “Alright, I’m gonna get my very first branded bag! Come on, it’s RM2000+ in the market and only RM900 here. What a bargain!”

So since it was easier to negotiate and trade through MSN, I was clearly oblivious about it being a fraud.

So I gave them my credit card number, and a picture of my credit card as well as my passport. (I know I am stupid but thank goodness they did not manage to get anything through my credit card and I’m going to cancel it soon!)

They came back to me the next day telling me that they can’t accept Malaysian credit card, and that they would need me to do Bank Telegraphic Transfer.

This was the details that i was provided with:

Bank Name: United Overseas Bank Limited

Bank Address: 80 Raffles Place, UOB Plaza, Singapore 048624

SWIFT Code: UOVBSGSGXXX

Account Number: 349-110-631-8

Account Holder Name: Mirdat Sufar Amount: SGD $380

So of course I did the payment, with excitement that I’ll be getting my bag in 3-5 days after payment has been cleared. I was given hope, and all I got in return was a tight slap. Immediately after payment has been made, I waited until the max of 5 days and yet my bag hasn’t arrived. I emailed them at shop@designerluxurybrands.com but no, they did not reply. Earlier it only took them half an hour, or maximum a few hours to reply to my enquiries.

But this time, it took them days, yet I did not receive any reply.

I started to panic. (RM900 is a lot of money for an 18-year-old like me, you see.) As you can see from the ABOUT US picture I’ve attached, there’s this icon there under LIVE HELP showing whether or not the Life Support is online.

Once i spotted them online, but to my dismay they were offline under my MSN list. I then used another email account to add them at designerluxurybrands@live.com and immediately they came to my assistance.

When I finally revealed my identity, they blocked me instantly. I did not give up, I used another account and they added me again IMMEDIATELY. The same process repeated. Then, I knew for sure that I was cheated.

The reason I am telling you this embarrassing story is because I know that you have great potential in spreading the news both in Malaysia and Singapore. (They are based in Singapore by the way.) I do not wish to see anyone else out there to be tempted and fooled by this fraud. I am clearly very hurt, emotionally. (First time kena cheated leh!) I do not know who else I can turn to, which was why I decided to seek your help.

By the way, I know it is almost impossible, but is there any slight possibility of tracking who the Account Holder Name is and then inform the bank regarding this fraud, which will enable me to get my money back?

I hope to hear from you soon, and also hope you can do something about it to raise the awareness of others, especially those in Singapore. I’ll be more than happy to provide you more information regarding this, if there’s any if your mind.

Thanks Timothy for reading my rants. I really appreciate it! 🙂

Regards, Sharon Ong. (XXXXX.blogspot.com– I’m a Nuffnanger.) *If you were going to post this somewhere, can you not use my real name? THANKS! =)

My reply to Sharon

Dear Sharon,

I’m currently in Singapore now on business. I was working out of the Singapore office when somebody called the office and spoke to one of my colleagues. Apparently that person had seen the same ad on Dawn Yang’s blog, bought the goods and got scammed as well. She thought it might be a Nuffnang ad she saw but it wasn’t. We would know and we don’t run dodgy dodgy ads like this.

I am so sorry to hear about this. RM900 is a lot of money not just for an 18 year old but even for me.

I am so sorry to hear about your loss but don’t be discouraged. We all make mistakes and pay ‘tuition fees’ for it. In business I have lost money because of mistakes I have made once but never again after having paid such a hefty tuition fee.

I feel like I should share this with my readers so that nobody else falls victim to this scam (although I think once they’re exposed, they’re just going to start another site and do it all over again). Do I have your permission to publish your e-mail on my blog?

A lesson we could all take away from this is… if it’s too good to be true.. it probably is.

Best Regards,
Timothy Tiah

To my dear readers, do be careful over things like this.

We all learn from our mistakes.. but sometimes if we’re lucky and if others like Sharon here are willing to share her experience, we could all learn from the mistake someone else has made without having to pay the ‘tuition fees’.

Thank you for sharing this Sharon.