You may remember the posts last year about the letting agent in Leeds who was featured on BBC’s Watchdog twice accused of withholding deposits from students. The posts received a lot of comments from students who were claiming their money had been withheld, and some of them got quite upset about the whole thing.
The letting agent in question is no longer located at the premises in Leeds, and a new letting agent by the name of The Student Property Shop is now in their place. Some students are sceptical about whether the companies are related, judging by the emails I have received on the subject.
Anyhow, I decided to have a look at the website for The Student Property Shop, which is www.thestudentpropertyshop.co.uk. The website is hosted with our old friends 1and1 Internet, on the IP address: 87.106.210.120. If that IP address seems familiar to you, it should. It’s the IP address of the website for My Homez, which can be seen at www.myhomez.co.uk.
So the two websites are hosted on the same server, with the same IP address. This doesn’t mean anything, except that the same person runs the account with 1and1 Internet.
However, when you dig deeper you find something a little more interesting. Have a look at this code for example.
<img id=”mainimage_back” src=”http://www.myhomez.co.uk/images/property/{DA84A2EE-9A01-4FDA-961A-151ABC9A6168}.jpg” alt=”Student property in Leeds” width=”275″ />
You can see that the code for the image is from the website for My Homez… except this code isn’t from the My Homez website at all… it’s from the website for The Student Property Shop.
Here’s a screenshot from the code itself.
I wonder why they’ve done that?
Again, this doesn’t necessarily mean that My Homez and The Student Property Shop are in any way related, but if they’re not, The Student Property Shop are stealing images from My Homez.
So, to find out more about The Student Property Shop I clicked on their contact us, and found that the map the website uses (from Google Maps) didn’t work. The reason for this? Well, just read the alert from Google in the below screenshot.
Seems the API key for Google maps was registered for a different website. Anyone care to hazard a guess at what website that is?
Error thrown
Call to undefined function eregi()