Price not identified as being in US dollars

Some credit card issuers do not charge international transaction fees, but certainly most do. Nothing surprising there. You learn which ones to use when shopping on international sites or travelling. Check Canstar for the best.

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The one time I updated the maps on my 2015 Outback, I paid in Hungarian currency - which meant I didn’t really know how much I was paying, apart from a lot.
It resulted in twice yearly “updates” that were at least 9 months behind what was actually happening on the roads in Perth. By comparison, free Apple Maps on my iPhone were sometimes updated within hours of a new road being commissioned.
My advice: the map app and geodata on your iPhone is superior to the Subaru GPS.

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7 posts were merged into an existing topic: Car GPS Navigation and traffic

.com as a web address.
That’s a red flag right there. Though no one expects people to note a web address.

Many may note a web address.
Is it also appropriate to note most of us consumers remain totally ignorant of what it all means.

One view of internet competence is an expectation it offers a myriad of ways to respond to the user clicking randomly on a page. All with an expectation the web page etc will actually respond in a way the average consumer can gain benefit. If not obvious, based on my observation of others of similar life experience who share reminiscences of doing sums on a slate, and relatively recently exposed to the digital revolution.

Why is .com a red flag?

It is a gTLD used without restriction anywhere in the world. Maybe you are referring to an absence of a ccTLD such as .au which would indicate registry in Australia. But says nothing about where a website is hosted.

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It’s a red flag because not using the .com.au should make you investigate the site.
I would.

That is saying the same thing twice, not one explaining the other.

The suffix .com.au doesn’t mean it is an Oz company or based here. The suffix .com doesn’t mean it is from anywhere in particular, and it may belong to a local company.

Have a look at the thread on machinery sales scams to find out more about the lengths bad actors will go to to hide their tracks, for them registering a .com.au web page is automatic.

Yes you have more rights and more chance of having them enforced for a company subject to Oz consumer law but the suffix doesn’t tell you that.

Even if the suffix was indicative of origin not all locals are good and not all furriners are evil.

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And that’s why you investigate every online transaction.
It’s the only way.
Unless it’s a site you’ve dealt with before, and even then you look for differences in the site or process.
Never takes more than five minutes for me to make a decision about a site. And general rule is if it looks to good to be true then walk away.
I don’t need all the places you cite to make a decision to proceed or not.
And I always check the currency before processing.

Yes indeed. Which involves much more than looking at URL suffixes.

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Yes, but.

.com.au registration requirements do place some restrictions on who can get one.

This is true.

You’re dying to tell, go on, do it. What restrictions?

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I did a search for map updates for Subaru vehicles, Australia. The first two returns are clearly Subaru, Australia. (As are 7 of the first 8 returns for the search).
image

Guess where you end up by following the prompts on the website page? Subaru Map Update Delivery Portal exactly the same destination to which the email I received directed me.
image

So many thanks for your feedback on domain names and the need for care in entering websites. I fear I would have still expended $320.08 AUD instead of the $214 AUD I believed I was paying.

Most disappointing has been the lack of any real response to date from Subaru Australia.

For them not to be aware of the situation in which customers wishing to upgrade their maps on their Subaru are placed beggar’s belief.

Thu 15/12/2022 9:50 AM

Case 00726565: Re: Renewal of maps for 2019 Subaru Forester [ ref:_00D58Z5BV._5008e7Gzz9:ref ]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for contacting Subaru Australia,

We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused by the Map Subscription email. Subaru is currently investigating this matter, and will be in contact as soon as possible with any further updates.

In the meantime should you have any further concerns don’t hesitate to contact us.

Regards,

Customer Relations Consultant
Subaru (Aust) Pty Limited
4 Burbank Place Norwest NSW 2153
T 1800 226 643
E feedback@subaru.com.au
subaru.com.au

My original email to Subaru Australia was sent on 8 Dec 2022.

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These rules are all to do with the name chosen matching or resembling the organisation, nothing to do with verifying its ownership or purpose. Any scammer can fulfil that requirement easily.

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Maybe. Maybe not. You haven’t spelled out which among those conditions you think is the path of least resistance for a scammer.

What checks any given registrar makes are up to the registrar but registrars are expected to implement the restrictions created by auDA.

If you rely on “company name” to get a .com.au then it does mean that it is an Oz company - by definition - and it would be relatively involved (have to be worth the scammer’s time) to create an Oz company.

At a minimum, registrars will typically demand an ABN and work from there in their checking (even though this actually rules out some entities who legitimately meet the auDA requirements).

As you say, there is no check on what the “purpose” is. If you successfully create an Oz company and thereby successfully get a .com.au domain name then it most certainly does not mean that your purpose is legitimate, and not a scam.

With the new Director ID requirements, I have my doubts that creating an Oz company is going to be the right approach for an overseas scammer.

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I think you will need to be patient. You do have to give them the opportunity to resolve this themselves. Fair Trading etc. won’t be very interested if you have not at least tried to get the company to resolve the problem.

So many scammers just simply copy the ABN from a legitimate Australian company, create a domain name close to the name of that companies trading name, and it sails through without issues apparently to .com.au registration by whatever registrar that is supposed to be checking properly.

Long gone are the days when there was a single assigned authority who handled ccTLD .au and took their job seriously.

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Why? I cannot see any condition that might give them any trouble. Why am I to make up a hypothetical?

It doesn’t say that anywhere, that is your hypothetical. It doesn’t say anything about how or if any of the conditions might be verified. If you want to present evidence about what the registrars of typically do in the course of their jobs please do so but so far it is speculation.

Once again we are chasing down a darkened mine looking for a black cat that may or may not be there.

Let’s agree that a sufficiently motivated criminal will always find a way.

Said overseas criminal can find some Australian who is short on both dollars and sense and pay that person to go through the Director ID rigamarole and then go through the ASIC process of registering a genuine Australian company, getting an ACN and any name that ASIC allows, and then register to get an ABN and then there should be absolutely no problem to register a matching domain name (because everything is ostensibly above board).

(This kind of “unwitting director” definitely does happen and is one of the things that Director ID is designed to make more difficult.)

Many Australians don’t pay a whole lot of attention to the domain name - and some browsing user interfaces don’t necessarily make it easy to do that - and changes in recent years in auDA and at a global level have reduced the useful information that is available from a domain name anyway. So you wonder whether a scammer would bother with .com.au


 but we do digress from the OP - as it is not alleged that any of the web sites is a scam as such.