News from Asia Fashion Wholesale

Hey, guys!

I am not sure if you guys read my Asia Fashion Wholesale review here *click* from some weeks back. In any case, I just wanted to share this piece of news I found on their website with you.

So I was writing up a more detailed blog post on them and went to their website to do a bit of research. As I was browsing, I saw this tiny line on top that read, 'Important notice and big apologize'. Wondering what this could be about, I clicked on it only to see what I deem to be quite a major issue. I've attached the full statement below (spelling/grammar errors and all) because I wanted to quote them word for word incase I misunderstood anything.


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Important notice and big apologize

We are very sorry that a dismission employee stole our customers' emails and use the emais illegally.

That guy joined another company and that company tried to cheat our customers with below mean tricks:
1) They registered very similiar domains (only change one or two words of our website domain).
2) They copied our web pages and photos (in order to let/cheat you think they belong to our company).
3) They sent SPAM emails to you to cheat you to place order and pay money.(Please don't risk to do business with such company.)

Please make sure you open our page from your favorite sites, or enter http://Asia-Fashion-Wholesale.com/welcome into the browser.
1) Please don't register or login from the fake pages.
2) Please don't place order or make payment on the fake pages.
3) Please don't click the link from the SPAM emails.
4) If you experience failure login at that fake website, you are recommended to modify your member password.

We appreciate your information and suggestion very much if you could provide more details.

It may take a very short time for us to resolve this horrible problem.
Hope you understand the current situation and we promise we never disclosed your information at any conditions and we will avoid such problem in the future.

We will try our best to offer good product and nice service for you as before.

Asia-Fashion-Wholesale.com Team
28th June, 2011

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Our web store is http://Asia-Fashion-Wholesale.com/welcome

Our customer service email is AsiaFashionWholesale@gmail.com

Our Paypal is yangdefang@gmail.com

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For the original statement, click here *click*

As I said on Twitter, spam emails I can deal with because I think people are smart enough not to open spam AND click on the links inside anyway. In fact, I did notice I have been getting some emails from what I thought was AFW, but upon closer inspection, I now realized that the sender is actually Asia-FashionS-Wholesale. They seem to have just added an 's' to the name of the fake account. Luckily, Hotmail marked these emails as Spam, so I chucked them all without even looking.

What is worrisome is perhaps what else this ex-employee (and his croonies) can do. I am more concerned about other forms of breaches of security/privacy.

Personally, I am not sure what else AFW could have done better as I am not too familiar with the workings of the company. But I feel they could have at least notified their customers in a better way. Putting a tiny link on your website is hardly enough when anyone could have easily missed it.

Anywayz, I just wanted to spread the word to be more careful if you're purchasing from AFW or any other online shop for that matter.

Incidentally, I'm doing my dissertation on Internet Marketing (Pros and Cons) and this has been quite an interesting case study for me.