I seriously doubt that the guy from domyphoto.com is the photographer because he was trying to sell me the set as "EXCLUSIVE". I don't know how XPhotography would have gotten them if he hadn't sold them yet. And XPhotography has been around for quite awhile.
Yesterday someone posted on the board about domyphoto.com and gave the e-mail address
[email protected] which I e-mailed with questions.
He then ICQed me and told me to send him a wire to a Russian account. I spoke to the bank about it and they said it might take as long as 30 days to get to him, so I came back to ask about alternate methods but he'd said he was going to bed and he was not online.
Meanwhile I had e-mailed the address on the site,
[email protected] because I had not heard back from the original e-mail (this was before the first guy ICQed me.) After I came back to ask about the wire, I was ICQed by someone else, who said the wire information I had was NOT his, and he wanted to give me Western Union info.
So apprently the first guy I talked to was trying to scam people into thinking the domyphoto.com stuff was his. Thankfully, I sent him no money.
The second guy proved that he was from domyphoto.com by giving me a password that I sent to
[email protected] and also by adding the word "SOLD" beside the set I was considering ordering.
So I actually sent him the money via Western Union.
Later I was searching for more content in the same niche and I came across some of the sets that I had just bought as "exlucsive" at XPhotography. Needless to say I was very upset.
Luckily I was able to cancel this transfer before he went to pick it up.
I thought I'd done my homework because he said he had all the ID's and 2257 documents, but sometimes you just don't know, no matter how hard you try So from now on, I'm sticking to content providers that I already know. I hate that I have to do this because I'll be missing out on some great stuff, but I'm not taking chances like this anymore.
To top it off, my computer is currently down. Right after he ICQed me to tell me he couldn't pick up the money and I told him that I wasn't buying stolen content, my computer crashed and there is no master boot record anymore and my drive is bare. Everything is gone. My sites, my content... EVERYTHING. Even photos of my babies.
I know, I know, everyone is going to say I'm a dumbass for not backing everything up, but we were going to purchase a brand new hard drive to put into our spare computer AND a ton of CD's to burn everything in TWO DAYS. I kid you not, just two days and I'd have been backed up and safe.
Now, I'm not saying he attacked me, maybe he didn't. But I CAN tell you that my hard drive is less than 1 year old, my computer is about 1 year old and I had a firewall and TWO virus protection programs installed. And he probably DID have my IP address from where I logged into his content store.
I know I'll be flamed and blamed, but I don't care. I want to try to prevent this from happening to anyone else, even if it makes me look like a moron.
