General Category > FAQ on games, gaming & IT
SCAM WARNING: Illusion Mage, 3D Magix Pro, Mirage Wizard - do NOT buy
kat:
Be aware there are a good number of new articles appearing online, which incidentally have appeared within a few days of each other over the Christmas/New Year period on more websites than Yell.com has in its directory, all attesting to how "great" IllusionMage3D and/or 3D Magix Pro are and how they're genuine products. They're not of course. It's all smoke and mirrors.
As before, these new articles repeat claims of being "honest" and "personal" reviews of IllusionMage, which again, they're not. But that's besides the point because in suggesting that these reviews are "personal" and "honest" the author is tapping into a well understood and used psychological sales 'trick' that takes advantage of a fundamental 'flaw' (as salesmen liken it to being) in way we process the information we absorb; that we are more likely to believe something when it's told to us by someone. This means our initial assumptions about a product, whether founded in truth or lies, if not countered, are believed because we generally 'trust' what we're told; a review on a web site that appears to belong to a 'person' (as opposed to a business) plays into the aforementioned 'flaw' because we automatically assume the contents to be true by association - it's on someone's personal site so must have been written by a person, therefore it must be true/real, even if the opposite is in fact the case (notwithstanding the originating articles author being a real person, obviously).
This is why scams work, something that's exacerbated (for consumers) if sellers are not honest from the outset. If that's the case then it's relatively straightforward to manipulate the initial assumptions made about a product being looking at; we only start to get a hint that something's wrong when we start to see the same information appearing over and over again in different guises, the IllusionMage article spam being a case in point as it all tends to cite the same bullet points from one article to another despite the apparent differing authorship - it's one thing to cite product features, but quite another to find a users experience of using the software (the 'review') to be, word-for-word, almost identical to dozens of others.
For this latest crop of fake reviews and articles on IllusionMage/3D Magix Pro there's an added twist; repeat references to the products "Sales Rank" and "Refund Rate". In the context of this scam, this is a misappropriation of sales data directly associated with Clickbank.net, the payment and affiliate gateway through which IllusionMage is being sold and the scam carried out, for the express and deliberate purpose of lending an air of faked authenticity - by citing these numbers the scammer is reinforcing the perception of the products 'persona', making it appear more 'real' and 'truthful' than it actually is. Sales Rank and Refund Rates information is not generally available to the public, so your common-or-garden-varity article author doesn't have access to the kind of numbers that would facilitate their being able to calculate a score in the first place, that is of course, unless they're an affiliate themselves, in which case they would have access to their own sales numbers, based on commission, from which they would then be able to calculate the Clickbank Rank and Rate. It's all relative though as only the original product seller would have a true picture of the items Sales Rank and Refund Rate and as these new articles prove, even that's faked for the sake of the scam.
Screengrab from Clickbank.net, each Facebook 'like' shown in the above image is someone 'earning' an affiliate commission through the promotion of the scam (or just a 'like' based on not knowing what's actually going on) - obviously this does mean watching out for fake IllusionMage Facebook profiles, groups and pages set up to promote the scam (of which there are a good few, report them as "spam/scam") if you find them).
JeroenM:
Hi,
I registered especially to bring you up to date at this one.
Ton wrote an article about this rebranding, scamming and leeching thing with 3dmagix(pro) and IllusionMage at http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundation/press/re-branding-blender/
He also published some more sources of the images used on these scamsites with links to the respective webpages of the rightful copyrightholders.
Greetings
Jeroen
kat:
Thanks for posting the info, it's certainly good to see Ton finally addressing the issue directly that's for sure ;)
JeroenM:
Some action is being taken. I can't do much myself because I don't run websites and stuff but read all about it on Blendernation. http://www.blendernation.com/2011/02/02/3dmagix-and-illusionmage-scam-or-open-source-leeches/
kat:
Thanks for the headsup.. just posted some comments there.
[edit] turns out (thanks to "Paul" posting the link on BlenderNation) that all the video tutorials included in this 'package' are grabbed from http://www.ibiblio.org/bvidtute/ as they're released under "Art Libre" license, which does allow "commercial use" of material so long as attribution is stated, not just license inclusion.
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