ISPreview investigate the fraud @ VisualDepth

This instantly sparked memory's of the first instance only ten days ago, we ran our own 'logged' dun test and found exactly the same results as above. You could even login to each service using the username from either one. As such we posted a news item and decided to wait for a reply.

VD's first reply claimed a 'security issue' to be the cause and that our initial allegations were false. From that point on a dialogue consisting of numerous E-Mails between ourselves and the PR man @ VD started, we simply couldn't accept his explanation because it wasn't explained enough. We believed our readers to be more intelligent and that such allegations required a more concise reply, ironically we were doing it for VD's own good. Had we posted the two-word explanation then nobody would have believed them; nor us.

Solution Number.2

Up until now it was thought that EzeSurf could have been knowingly involved, however that remained the purest of speculation. Sadly we were unable to get the details we wanted from VD and so after several days posted an update. Included in this update was an E-Mail from Ezesurf:

"There _is_ no relationship between Visual Depth and Ezesurf other than it _appears_ they use SurfSaver to buy shares for their customers.

I was premature in even comparing them to Calenet as they appear not to have a contract with us to re-sell the SurfSaver package."

From that moment on we were quite satisfied that EzeSurf wasn't knowingly involved, why? Because they knew we'd find something out if it existed due to past experiences =). That left VD; in the end we had to re-write their reply after having been banned from quoting anything in their E-Mail responses:

"Sadly we are not allowed to quote from Steve's (VD) mail and so we'll do our best to re-write it in our own words. The problem with the phone numbers being the same is simply that they use the same backbone (Planet On-Line) and we think that's a fair statement. As for the login details and VD users having EzeSurf logins etc., that has been put down to a 'security issue'.

The best we can guess is that 'Planet Online ISPs' are all intertwined, but there is a bug in the system, which seems to kill off individuality. So technically because of this bug, anyone from Ezesurf can login to VD and vica versa for all Plant supported ISPs."

At the time we believed VisualDepth used Planet Online as their network supply, why? Because that's the only way it could make sense and they never said it wasn't true in replies, though nor did they say it was. After having posted the latest update it was clear that we had caused some anger @ VD, who promptly asked us to stop posting such news.

In their reply it was let slip that they didn't use Planet Online for their bandwidth, from that moment on we knew something was wrong and had they not said that then we may have never pursued the issue again.

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