I’m glad I wasn’t the only one. It’s pretty scary how much willful damage smart people with anti-social/self-serving goals can do to the rest of us.

Thanks for your comments!

ea/

This is really savvy, if you ask me. nearly got me and I’m no noob in the virtual world too, living and breathing the internet to put it mildly, so, you’ve got to hand it to these scammers. hand them a bomb or something, that is. lol

I’m sure this has been an awful headache for you. I hope it dies down soon and you can get back to business-as-usual.

It’s scary to see how easy it is for an unscrupulous person (or crew) to cause serious damage to someone’s reputation. Thank you for listing your “lessons learned thus far” so others can learn from your experience.

I think I might dig around a little and see what I can glean from others’ best practices that they’ve developed in the wake of such nightmares. There might be a few more good rapid-response ideas out there, too.

Good luck sorting this all out and settling it down. Maybe you can even leverage this into a higher profile and win some new customers!

Hey, why not try?

ea/

Another red flag with these emails is that all order confirmation emails I receive have some sort of billing and shipping address information. This email had none. It was one of the things we pointed out when we were trying to convince people that it was a fake. All of the order confirmations we send out include the billing and shipping address for the order. We also have some pretty good experience dealing with actual credit card fraud since we have been an online retailer for almost 9 years. When we receive an order that is placed with a stolen credit card the criminal never uses the real person’s email address. Their goal is to get the merchandise shipped to them while drawing the least amount of attention to their order.

Here is a little insight as to how things went on our end yesterday morning. Like Erin, I had not been up very long and was drinking coffee, checking email, etc. when I started getting voice mail notifications one after another. I’m talking like 5 messages every few minutes. I immediately knew something was wrong. I listened to one of the voice mails and it was somebody who was pretty upset about the order that they didn’t place. Since this is the second time the spammers had used us (it had happened 6 months ago as well) I immediately knew what was going on. My heart sank and I knew I was in for a tough day. The first thing I did was leave a message on our voice mail trying to explain to people what was happening. I knew we didn’t have the manpower to return all the phone calls that day and the voice mails just kept pouring in. This worked pretty well. The next thing I did was update the contact us section of our site because I knew this was where people were going to be looking. But the site was down. The last time this happened it did not bring the site down. So now it’s time to call our IT guy and get his take on what is bringing the server down. I think sometime after that I post something to our facebook page. There were already many angry posts. What is tough is that I never got the email. I didn’t know about it until it was out there for a bit so people were looking for answers before I was even aware of what was going on. We spent the rest of the day answering emails, posting to facebook, blogging, fixing the site, etc. It was a frustrating day and it was hard not to take the angry comments personally. Now, I think most people understand what happened and that we were not involved. It really helps to have posts like this one to inform people.

I’m resigned to the fact that this situation will happen again since there is nothing we can do to prevent it. For the business owners that have yet to experience something like this, I can tell you what I will do differently for the next time. I will have facebook, twitter, blog posts, etc. pre-written so that they can be posted quickly. You can not respond fast enough. People will be demanding answers 20 minutes before you even know there is a problem. I am also going to have a spam section of the website up permanently that describes general spam tactics. In addition we will be making some technical changes which are too boring to list here.

Now that we are 24 hours out I can say that good things came of this experience. We learned a lot and it’s situations like this one that push me to run my business better.

I was, of course, only one of hundreds of people hit with this hacker’s email message.

My deepest sympathies to the folks at ShopLAStyle. On the bright side, I’d never heard of them before, and now I have, and I feel empathy for their struggle in this issue. I might even have to check out their store.

Every cloud has a silver lining.

Maybe.

ea/

Hi,

thanks for your post.

Unfortunately, I don’t yet have an idea for a quick and easy, ready-to-use solution.

The main question basically is:
Do all tables (in WP-Table Reloaded) on that site have three columns, where the third column contains a currency value that shall be right aligned?
If that’s the case, just a small piece of CSS is necessary.

If not, we could use a filter hook to add a CSS class to all cells that contain the $ symbol (as that’s going to be a cell with a currency value obviously), and then use that CSS class to align the text to the right.

Regards,
Tobias

Clearly, the second option, a CSS filter hook, will work better for my solution because the tables are different sizes and formats, and not all have currency values in them.

I have responded with this clarification, and hope Tobias can tell me how to set this up. Stay tuned!

ea/

“item (iTunesMetadata.plist) exists in the zip file, but is not declared in the OPF file

”

The issue: If I get this message, it means that I’ve already loaded my ePub into iTunes. iTunes inserts this code automatically into the file. Why? Dunno. Probably something it thinks it needs?

How to solve it:

One way to solve this is to create a fresh ePub version of the file and NOT load that copy into iTunes before running the check. Make a duplicate ePub file of the ebook after it passes the test, and LOAD THE COPY into iTunes, keeping the original file pristine and error-free!’

Apparently there is a way to remove this code from a file, too, but the recipes I’ve tried so far haven’t worked for me yet.