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Guy uses Opera Mini and gets disqualified from unemployment claim

8 Comments
 Published November 28th, 2007 12:50 PM EST By Daniel Goldman

Here is an unfortunate story of one guy who got disqualified from government unemployment benefits because he was using Opera Mini.

This guy lives in Oregon, and filed an unemployment claim with the state. The Oregon Department of Unemployment rejected his claim because the fraud investigation unit believed he was out of the Country for two weeks. They claimed he was in Oslo, Norway for 2 weeks.

It turns out that he filed the claim using the Opera Mini browser. And since Opera Mini uses a server (located in Oslo, Norway) to pre-process and compress all the webpages, it appeared to the Oregon Department of Unemployment as though it was filed from Oslo, Norway.

Read about his experience on his blog.

Hehe… I’ve heard of sites blocking Opera desktop users, now they’re blocking Opera Mini users too? What has the world come to? :)

Btw, there is a way for websites to determine the geographic location of the Opera Mini user. One of the custom HTTP headers that Opera Mini sends out is the X-Forwarded-For header, which contains the user’s original IP address (read about it on dev.opera).

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8 Comments

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  1. 1 Bo Nov 28th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
    using Opera Opera 9.50 on Linux Linux

    OMG. It’s so sad to see people getting into problems because some guys have no idea on which criteria they judge :-(

  2. 2 kL Nov 28th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
    using Opera Opera 9.50 on Mac OS Mac OS X

    They’re really lame. Opera’s proxies make it really easy to trace original IP, unlike for example AOL. I wonder if UK AOL users are getting accused of visiting USA 3 days a week…

  3. 3 yeeliberto Nov 28th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
    using Opera Opera 9.24 on Windows Windows XP

    Damn you CVS, I will not buy anymore of your crapy products.

  4. 4 Daniel Aleksandersen Nov 29th, 2007 at 6:13 am
    using Opera Opera 9.24 on Windows Windows 98

    Is it not funny how “security” and “fraud prevention” folks always are the ones with the least knowledge?

  5. 5 Steve Barker Nov 29th, 2007 at 9:37 am
    using Opera Opera 9.24 on Linux Linux

    I do not own a mobile phone, but have just been playing with the OperaMini demo – Opera Mini gets the “World” edition of BBC news – my desktop gets the UK edition.

  6. 6 Required Nov 29th, 2007 at 10:09 am
    using Opera Opera 9.24 on Windows Windows XP

    Incompetent fools

  7. 7 opera11 Nov 29th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
    using Opera Opera 9.24 on Windows Windows XP

    Hy
    Why dont suit the cvs.com?

  8. 8 Nafcom Dec 1st, 2007 at 10:57 pm
    using Opera Opera 9.50 on Windows Windows Vista

    This is so sad :(

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Opera Watch, an Opera browser blog, is run by Daniel Goldman, who used to work for Opera Software as a Technical Evangelist.

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