XPICS: How Did You Rob Them? (THROWBACK)
 

I was 14 at the time, and owned zero domains...
I remember I was surfin the web one sunday, and I saw something that said "Webmasters, Make 18 cents per click"

Sounded like a helluva deal..
then I click it and find out it's a porn program...

I signed up and soon realized I could beat my allowance of $10 a week by clicking on my own banners (They had like 8 sites I think), logging off the internet, logging back on (to get a new IP address so the next 8 clicks would be unique/new to the system) and REPEAT....

I did this for about an hour a day....
and suprise suprise the check came...

I was making money from nothing
Had my 8 banners set up on a tripod page....

Then I got to thinking..
how can I make more...
then one night it hit me...

After seeing how the password sites were promoting XPICS...
I did some usenet spamming, I'd post a message in every group with a large audience, the video game board, the alt.gun room..
whatever....

This is the way I'd set up the hustle
"Hey Everybody, We just got a list of stolen/hacked passwords to some porn sites, now you can get in for free! The might not last long, so get them now. If they don't work right now give them about few hours and try again sometimes if a password is being overly used it will keep it from working for a few hours*)


I'd set up the links like

http://fake:[email protected].../myaccountcode


I was making like $60-$100 a day...
not to mention one weekend they had a 40 cent's a click promotion...
DAMN..
That was some easy money man....
I miss those days

I only wish I had got in on it sooner....
and been able to make more before the industry changed up...

With XPICS, some people got shaved by XPICS, some people robbed XPICs...

This is truly a Throwback Story

I wonder if there was no webmasters robbing them if shaving would have been less.

WG

Well, considering XPICS robbed the consumer with "Free Trials" all day and never told them they were getting charged, I'd say anything you did to rob XPICS was fine.

yeah I sure remember their first page click count for 18cents, the problem is too many people had pages with 6-8 frames 1 for each site so the cash flows by spamming on IRC, newsgroup or whatever.

so many people robbed them...

but they sure were my first sponsor along with cyberthrill :1orglaugh

souvenirs!

xpics just auto cross billed you..haha

Funny thing about XPICS..
no live stats for them..
the stats updated every morning at like 11

Somebody mentioned Cyberthrill,
I think they were like the first Super Crooks to run an affiliate program...

There policy was promote our site..
you won't get paid..
you gotta love it..

I NEVER GOT PAID
and some of those clicks where from real customers

Gee thats great advice. NOT.

The free trials were stated just as clearly as most of the sponsors do today. ( they were just one of the first to do it )

Eventually they started fake rebills, but that still doesnt make it ok to rip off people either way.

They were almost the pioneer of rebills for the adult industry.

They didnt go bust from bad webmasters they went bust from merchant abuse.

ahhhhhhh the good ol' days

LOL I had fake warez sites, fake password sites and much more back then. Usenet spam, E-Mail Spam.

I'd often spam the URL to a toplist to get my rank up, much safer than spamming direct links to your own site or sponsor.

I was 16 years old pulling in $500+/day

..... now im 22 and broke as hell. Why the fuck did I ever go 'legit' ???

I never "robbed" them but I did send them alot of clicks by releasing passwords to my paysites then using pennywise to redirect those hits to a page of xpics banners, and I sent about 20k usenet clicks a day to that page of banners... and some toplist traffic (remember toplists?!) was enough to bring in $20k a month and buy my first house after a few months of thier checks and epoch checks

I used to do that with some mainstream programs..... :thumbsup

XPICS was great, i owned a banner exchange at the time, sent them 20k hits a day and got paid for them all

HEhe True colors here..
So ya stole from XPICS basically.

Whats to stop ya from steeling from another sponsor program?

They grew up?

This industry is doomed.

The next step for affiliate programs is by approval.

Ya think its a great idea to brag about how commiting fraud in the past will warrant any credibility to a future as a credible professional webmaster for a sponsor program?

I think not and yet people are gonna cry why they were not approved as an affiliate for XYZ sponsors...

HAhahahahhahahahahah!

Fucking idiots..

Xpics... the good ol'days :)
I was playing honest all the way.
I spamed newsgroups and stuff like that. But wasn't getting over $10/day.
Then I found out that there are Thumbnail Gallery Posts.. That is how the game begins. PK was so nice that she'd listed my link site in her list. I've made $500 in that day with a simple banner and a few honest pics.
I was already thinking about buying a good car, but then next day XPics changed to pay per sign up..

That sucked.. :glugglug

That was years ago. He was 14. I did the same thing with Cyber Thrill when I was 15... only difference is I never got paid. Haha.

It always was.

Exactly :thumbsup

Im not saying we all havent made mistakes before , but bragging about how much of a thief you were/are is just plain ignorant.

And it reflects not only upon you, but also on your sponsors/sigs/etc.

AMEN

http://www.12clicks.com

time for a public service announcement.

:1orglaugh :1orglaugh bragging about stealing....ha ha (not sly rj..only thing I would steal is your anal virginity)

Hey at least I don't brag about all my successful rape adventures! Oh shit...

XPics cheques were what made me enough money to to go into this biz full time. I never had to cheat them. Anyone who put up a little money in those days to get real hosts and buy domains got so much traffic so easily, it just wasnt worth the risk of getting caught. It was the 14 year olds who got everything free that had nothing to lose by cheating. A lesson this business still hasn't learned.

I sent honest AVS traffic to them. It was probably worth more than 18-25 cents a click back them.

I was 15 when I started promoting XPics.

My Mom's friend worked for a local ISP and she let us use her Internet account so we wouldn't have to pay for it (we were poor)... well, I soon started reading about telnet/shell accounts and hacking, and because I had an ADMIN password to use, I downloaded the old Unshadowed password file, used "CrackerJack" on it, and the next thing I new I had about 50 user accounts to put my porn links on.

Looking back , it would have been SO easy for them to trace me through my affiliate codes and shit.... but I didn't even think of that then. Posted some gallies to thehun and was pulling in a few hundred bucks a week from XPics clicks.

I also remember having one of these isp.com/~user pages listed number one on AltaVista for "Mexican Sex" and "Black Sex"...

Ahhhh the good old days. Glad I never got busted.

Cheers! :glugglug

you all are a bunch of pathetic sheep..

Stealing when youre young is one thing but bragging about it on the board says a lot about some of you..

And when some kid shows up that 'accidently' stole some content
for his gallery he's a thief for life.

Idiots.

Throw in the easy manipulation of Infoseek at the time and it was an easy $500 day off of Xpics.

It was fun tying up the big adult keywords... "sex pictures" "pussy" "sex" etc...

the infamous superbowl template....

ahh Xpics, i never cheated them but they made me my first 25 bucks in this biz. had some shitty celeb site i put on fsn. i had no idea what i was doing then but the money was insentive to learn how to make more of it, and i did. :)

I mean damn...
all I really wanted was to get some stimulating conversation going....

I'm 21 years old now, that was 7 years ago...
and I can say that 7 years ago wipes out a little more than half of this GFY board....

So what I hustled for small change at the age of 14..
It sure beat the hell out of working at Mcdonalds...

Matter of fact, I couldn't even work at Mcdonalds because I was too young, but not too young to develope a drive to get this money....

I could say I did it because I was poor...
Or to help the family keep the lights on...

But I just wanted to keep a fresh pair of Jordan's on my feet...

7 years later, and I'm a professional webmaster...
and it still beats the hell out of working at Mcdonalds

hahaha... my story is pretty much the same. i came across them when i was 14 or 15. i made a huge website with tons of tyra banks pictures and filled it with xpics banners. i started pulling in some cash, but not anything to write home about.

then i discovered that i could post the links in newsgroups saying they were backdoor links into paysites. i kept my spamming limited to adult newgroups.

i was rolling in the dough and bought myself a laptop at like 15. xpics even paid for my prom.

i also did the whole clicking on my own banners, disconnecting and reconnecting thing.

i also had a few pages that auto refreshed to sponsors that counted raw hits. i had no idea what an ip address was back then. i found out what it was when the sponsor termed me and sent me logs showing 4000 hits from the same ip address in less than an hour.

:1orglaugh

Too bad you didn't work for McDonalds... you missed some lessons in life. :glugglug

robbing xpics for 7 years so that around 100,000+ USA

where did they go ? LOL

:1orglaugh

They were my first sponser too.
I was making good money and being payed weekly like clockwork.
I also start spamming like hell all the newsgroups and SE.
I think if it wasn't that easy money, I wouldn't have any sites today.
XPics and gamma were my first sponsers who put me on biz.

I got done for $2500 straight up by Cyberthrill, almost burnt me out of the business back in 1997. Worked my butt off 16 hour days for 5-6 weeks and the pricks didn't pay me. I remember Xpics, god damn they were the ones who got VISA to stand up and go "WHAT THE FUCK!". They had in the terms and conditions that you had to cancel using some god damn impossible ways, they made it impossible to cancel and just kept billing and billing and billing the customers $30-40 a pop.

Thats how they could pay 18 cents a click cause they were pure crooks rebilling 10,000's of customers without their consent.

Much like a huge number of sponsors did back from 1997-2000, i'm glad the business is cleaning itself up now days though.
We are paying for it now with the 1 % stuff cause of all the scammers doing this stuff in the past

Good story

Xpics kicked ass... to this day I havent found a sponsor who made me that much money even after they switched to per signup. Remember how they would list you in Tomkat links as long as you advertisied you're sites and send you like 5k a day? You could literally build a page with thier banners on it and submit it to them and make $50 a day from that traffic alone without really lifting a finger. Those were the days. Traffic flowed freely, joins were easy, then people got greedy. Sponsors, TGPs, webmasters... everyone thought they deserved a bigger piece of the pie and in an effort to accomodate everyone the surfer got screwed. Doubt we'll ever be able to gain back the trust people had in the biz back then, when Xpics was still paying $.18 a click, TGP's/link sites would list you just because of the quality of your content, and WM's had enough drive to get their own content, design their own galleries and sites, and submit them by hand. When the fuck did we all get so lazy anyway?

I was in Law School at the time, 97, and all of a sudden I was making 30k a month off of them.

"spice girls" alone made me a fucking fortune, for those who know what I am talking about. Infoseek, I thank you :-)

PlatinumLantern - I didnt mean to bag on ya so hard, ya been around a while ya got my respect however I can only hope that ya run legit in the business cuz talent is runnin damn rare these days.
Stay away from the darkside damn you!

Damn I still remember the special christmas banners...they were pretty cool :glugglug

Funny no other sponsor is offering seasonal banners. I thought they worked great!

interesting thread

bump

Not smart to brag about stealing $ from other people. Maybe when Brian Shuster decided to go after people for his patents, you will be first. I made a fortune with Xpics, was one of their largest legit affilates.

Damn, I missed out. Wish I had been around in the good old days.

Can't believe how many of these are still around. Used to pull clicks like crazy. I wonder why sponsors don't offer banners like these anymore.

http://www.baybreaks.com/expics/avsca598.gif

http://www.baybreaks.com/expics/axspb598.gif

http://www.baybreaks.com/expics/alssa0998.gif

I did very well with Xpics back in the day. And also Pure Hardcore when Dave S. owned it. Great programs for up and coming webmasters to make some loot.

Never had to cheat them to make over $100 a day. Seemed pretty easy back then even with just a small to mid-sized pic site.

hahaha... the christmas banners rocked!

correct,