Topic: SCAM WARNING: Illusion Mage, 3D Magix Pro, Mirage Wizard - do NOT buy

[kat]

..He probably got help...

It's not "help" so much as "affiliates".. That's how these scams work, someone puts a product up for sale on ClickBank.net/cbengine.com and people linking back to it get a cut of the price. The articles spam is to capture Google advert revenue, that's what was meant by the "win-win" comment. There are entire networks out there taking advantage of this kind of thing.

[JeroenM]

With "help" I mean that he's tempting, or luring if you like, people to do the job for him through his afilliates program.

[kat]

Personally I'd be less kind than saying they're being lured... participation in this scam seems largely 'deliberate' from what I've been seeing over the past few months looking at what pops up, so I don't get the same sense of the affiliates being 'hoodwinked' or otherwise 'persuaded' into taking part - they see price, see the percentage commission, create the account and then add the links to their already established traffic funneling networks, usually already carry dozens of other link-backs to other items for the same reasons. They class this kind of thing as "marketing entrepreneurship". We'd call it something else ;o)

[JeroenM]

Agreed, But my point is: he gets people doing the job for him. And personally i think that includes writing all those "reviews". At http[:]//www[.]illusionmage[.]com/affiliates.htm he even offers prewritten article packs (point 5 an 7 of the affiliates program)

[kat]

Oh yes that's what I mean, that's how these affiliate systems work, you get more people on-board if you can make it easier for them to do so. It's all very deliberate and calculated to get the highest returns possible with the least amount of effort (or originality). When I first started to look into this in early December last year, search results pulled in around 90k depending on which terms you used - "illusion mage", "illusionmage", "illusionmage3d" and so on. Now some of those return 250k+ search results, all of which will be earning Advert revenue from Google, you don't get that kind of return without a concerted effort on behalf of the participants.

[kat]

Wow! Talk about keyword stuffing!

3d animation
3d animation software, [3d animation], "3d animation", 3d animations, 3d animation studios, 3d animation, 3d animation modeling, 3d animation services, learn 3d animation, 3d animation cartoons, 3d animation training, 3d animation design, 3d animation program, computer 3d animation, 3d animation programs, 3d animation studio, 3d animation graphics

animation software
free animation software, animation software download, 2d animation software, best animation software, cartoon animation software, computer animation software, animation softwares, graphics animation software, free flash animation software, stop animation software, animation software software, free 2d animation software, stop motion animation software, animation software stop motion, video animation software, kids animation software, text animation software, free cartoon animation software, animation software for kids, pixar animation software, character animation software, graphic animation software, figure animation software, frame animation software, digital animation software, 3d computer animation software, picture animation software, game animation software, 3 d animation software, stickman animation software, toon boom animation software, buy animation software, children animation software, 3d graphics animation software, frame by frame animation software, animation software packages, kid animation software, children's animation software, lightwave animation software,

computer animation
3d computer animation, computer animations, cgi computer animation, computer animation art, how to computer animation, free computer animation, computer animation programs, 2d computer animation, computer animation, program, computer animation training, computer animation education, computer animation course, computer animation cartoon, computer animation design, pixar computer animation, computer animation production, computer animation studios, computer animation classes, computer animation information, learn computer animation

[kat]

Aaaand a lovely picture of Seth Avery himself.. who also happens to be "Christian Outreach Spokesperson", a "Coffee merchant", and a "Glamour boyfriend" (whatever the heck on of those are!). I don't know how he finds the time in between all the jet-setting he must do to inspect the plantations, being a playa! all the while running this scam (thanks to "Ste" for finding these).

[Matika]

Like another person, I joined this form so that I could post on this topic, though since I am here I might look around and rethink about using blender.

Anyway, the owner of IllusionMage has gone to another level. He now is going to 3d sites and collecting email addresses from their forums and sending an email offering a limited time offer to buy IllusionMage for 47 usd, with all the bells and whistles.  But when you get to the site it is a bait and switch.  He does himself an in justice by changing the price to 77 usd for the complete program.  That little step alone caused me to do more then just check the legit of the program.  Where as in a short time I was led to fox which had pulled his ad, then share4you which gave me this link.  A good friend emailed me telling me he was going to buy this for me if I had not already purchased it.  Fortunately he emailed me before buying it.   It was mentioned about no response to support.  He can a test to this as he emailed the owner asking if it could work with poser and never received a response.   So again, the man has sunk to a new low by lifting our email address from forum sites.

[kat]

Thanks for posting this info. It's good to know you caught this in the nick-of-time before anyone coughed up and lost their hard-earned money, which you won't have got back, I don't think anyone ever has.

The type of harvesting you mention is pretty common practice sadly. It takes advantage of the fact that forum and site admins often leave their member lists either visible to all and sundry, or visible to all members without taking the time to properly 'vet' people signing up. I do my best to avoid that on KatsBits.

I have to say that a good part of the reason these guys are able to 'get away' with what they're doing is because the Blender Foundation is not being as proactive as they could be in protecting the Blender brand name; sitting on ones laurels and indirectly defending this type of thing isn't effective license or 'rights' protection regardless of it being open-source material; it's doing more harm then it appears they realise because nothing is being done to properly redirect the misinformation that's now spreading like a virus on the 'Net.

[kat]

[copied body of this to first post]

If you've found yourself at the receiving end of the Illusion Mage, 3DMagix, 3D Magix Pro or whatever else '"Seth Avery" decides to call this 'product' and want your money back, there are a couple of things you can do to properly seek remedy against the payment. Note that these may vary depending on your geographical location so, although Mr Avery states clearly there is a 60 day refund policy, if you're in the UK making a purchase, your 'right' to expect what you paid for is protected under a 14 day return/refund Statutory Right (this has to be a legitimate grievance by the way, faulty goods, goods not as described and so on.. it's not normally binding where you simply change your mind after purchase - remedy in those situations are at the discretion of the seller, not the buyer).

• First... Make sure you submit a support/customer ticket with ClickBank and/or the various sites running the scams so your request is officially logged, this is important. You should receive and automated email reply of such.
• Then... Contact your bank, if you used a Credit, Debit Card or other bank based payment. Or PayPal and issue a charge-back or refund request making sure to state that you didn't receive what you paid for, goods were not as described and/or they may in fact be distributing 'illegal' copyrighted material or other statements to the affect that it's made clear the product is entirely different to what you were expecting (software updates excluding)

It's then just a question of seeing what response you garner from the Banks, unfortunately there's not too much more consumers can do beyond this. If the Bank or your payment gateway doesn't cancel or issue a charge-back on the transaction then you'll have to consider the money lost. For further information about ClickBank and both it's Sellers and Buyers Terms & Conditions see the following:

• http://www.clickbank.com/return_policy.html for ClickBank general Return/Refund policy.
• Client (Seller) Terms and Conditions http://www.clickbank.com/terms.html (pay special note to item 2.c).
• Also see http://www.clickbank.com/product_requirements.html "Product Requirements" all of which clearly outline and define the material that can be sold through their services. Pay particular attention to Part II.a, II.d.1, 2, and 15

It's important to point out that ClickBank itself is not a scam, however, it's services are used by scammers and whilst they may have a non-tolerance policy in place on such things, it relies on their being notified of such by customers.

[kat]

Was doing a bit more research on this last night when it occurred to me that the name "3D Magix Pro" is probably a deliberate choice of confuse the scam bundle with products from Magix; whilst Magix don't have a "3D Magix Pro", they do have a "3D Maker" and various "Pro" packages - "Video Pro X", "Movie Edit Pro" and "Xara Designer Pro".

This conclusion is highly circumstantially speculative of course, but I'd bet a hot-dog with everything on it that that assessment (based on my "Real Life[TM]" job) is pretty much 99.999% accurate due to 'his' use of the same tried and testing patterns of strategic placement all black box web marketeers use to funnel traffic to the pay-dirt, ones that are easily recognisable and is very deliberate.

What this means is that when a person searches using "3D", "Magix" and "Pro", Magix products pop up in the results because the search engine latches on to those words as they appear legitimately in their products, thus lending 'Seth Averys' scam an additional layer or apparent legitimacy to the unsuspecting. All in all this whole thing is a very calculated scam the Blender Foundation is woefully remiss in not tackling beyond posting a notice on a site that you won't know existed if you didn't already know what "Blender 3D" was.

[kat]

A couple more domains associated with propagating the scam. And as a sign of just how desperate 'he' is to push this junk all over the internet, take note of the domains being registered, spam personified. Wouldn't even be surprised if 'he' is using the same software forum spammers use to generate names by sandwiching a 'legit' name (one that reads as a proper name) between different letters of the alphabet.

Don't click the links below by the way, they don't go anywhere by the way, they're 'active' to make them visible to bots.

• illusionmagev.com
• illusionmagez.com
• softwarefor3d.com
• eillusionmagereview.com
• 3danimatingsoftware.com
• softwarefor3d.wikispaces.com
• sofwarefor3d.webs.com
• illusionmagereviewsite.com
• illusionmagereviews.com
• illusionmageanimationsoftware.com
• illusionmagereview.net
• bestanimationsoftwares.com
• logitechlasermouse.com (yes, you read that right, misappropriating Logitech to associate 'value' to the scam. Looks like this one has been 'corrected' (as of 10th Apr))
• easy3dsoftware.com
• forumimage.info
• illusionmagerreview.net
• best-animation-software.net
• best-animation-software-review.com
• 2011bestanimationsoftware.com
• animationsoftware3d.net
• illusionmage.co

As an aside here. It's interesting that most of the review sites pushing this junk for their 12 pieces of silver turn off community comments, have a 'moderation' policy in place the means the truth about the scam never gets posted (that puts the admin's of such places culpable in scams like this, irrespective of their rather broad reaching terms of service - if comments are actively blocked it means someone has made a judgment call in favour of allowing the scam to be continued), or have no way to get in touch with them to bring the issue to their attention - the usual way is to send a message to "abuse@[domain name]"; much of that gets bounced. Some even go so far as to have links to the FBI's Internet Crime Bureau, the Internet Crime Complaints Centre and a host of other law enforcement departments. All for the sake of adding to an already false impressions that plays with people perceptions. Sheesssh on a stick!

And by the way... what happened to Googles recent algorithm change that was supposed to hit article farms and content spammers hard?

[mikshaw]

[sarcasm]No, this is no scam.  It's capitalism at its finest[/sarcasm]
This guy has uploaded a number of promotional videos to YouTube as well, and regularly deletes any comments that mention Blender.

[kat]

According to one of many, many fake video reviews of Illusion Mage posted to YouTube (remove square brackets - http[:]//www[.]youtube[.].com/watch?v=dR2zgRLaEvI [1:12 mark]), "Seth" has had a lot of plastic surgery recently to change his appearance (see attachment), he'd make Nicolas Cage and John Travolta proud!.

[sarcasm]After notifying the FBI he was about to change his appearance he was told him to remain out of sight so people wouldn't make a connection to his previous appearance. However, his desire to gorge on his ill-gotten gains meant his not being able to resist showing 'his' smirking mug in yet more Illusion Mage videos[/sarcasm]

[EDIT]image removed at the request of the real Seth

[kat]

Word is coming in that more and more store fronts are pulling this product as soon as they find out it's a scam. So if you're on any mailing lists and/or members of various stores and shops that sell software, let the owners know as soon as you see anything to do with this scam pop up on their networks. Spreading the word works and is a more effective way of shutting down this kind of shenanigans.

[EDIT] Speaking of business resellers... Although IllusionMage now appears to be removed from ClickBank.com's searchable catalogue (it doesn't turn up in product search results), they still appear to be acting as a payment gateway for Messrs Avery's when clicking through from the IM web site. This probably means that affiliates can't sign-up directly on ClickBank any more, but they might still able to earn their ill-gotten gains using the gateway.