Before you guys start to advise me on free P2P websites, I already know and use them. But yesterday I ran into a website that charged a very reasonable 10-15 cents a song. Beside having a huge database, there is a sample feature so I can check out the songs before getting them. The main reason I liked the site was that I could get obscure songs that is hard to find on the P2P websites, and I actually wouldn't mind paying if/when the price is reasonable. I thought 15 cents per song was reasonable... So I got curious and looked up just how much the other sites cost. The cheapest was 79 cents per song and as high as 99 cents. Now here comes the kicker: This websites is from Russia! That explained a lot of things. For example I am almost sure the artists don't get any reimbursement for their music. There are just a few questions I ponder about: 1. Just how safe it is to give your CC number to a Russian company who is infriging musicians? 2. How come that so far no big legal musicdownload website sued them? Their 10-15 cents price is fairly superior to any American legit site. 3. If I use the website, as a costumer am I supposed to know if the website is legit or not? After all I am paying for the product, if they don't pay the artists it is not my fault. The website itself looks pretty professional...
Giving your CC number to a questionable company in Russia is probably not the wisest course of action.
If they ever get cracked down on they will have your credit card number and all your information on where to find you to prosecute. You're better off with the free sites or the legit pay sites.
True. But on the other hand, just how do we know that products on Overstock.com are not stolen goods? There is no way for the costumer to know if a website is legit or doing shady deals. Except maybe for the "if it is too good to be true...." rule....
Use your internet CC, the one with the tiny limit. You have one, right? That's old internet wisdom. As for the artists not being compensated, who cares? They can tour and make money while they're working, like the rest of us do. They should be thankful that, due to the unique nature of their product and the fact that it can be mass reproduced, that they get any extra money at all for their labor.
Assuming you are serious, you didn't post the site, you have to be very careful. I would leave it alone. The driving force behind these scams is something they know that you don't. ALMOST EVERYBODY IS A THIEF IF THEY PERCEIVE A RISK/ REWARD SCENARIO THAT BENIFITS THEM. You point out that the artist is probably being cheated but not your problem as long as you percive benefit. A perfect example of the psychology . You probaly are very sure you're an upstanding citizen and will provide pages of documentation to that effect, the Overstock mention is a fine example. See how it works. Most probably what they are doing is collecting cc#'s. Using a cc with a small limit only limits the amount chargeble to that card. It gets a bit complicated. No biz actually deposits cc income into it's account. There are cc clearing firms that are not the issuing bank. The issuing bank provides the credit to you and the limits on the card. The clearing firm, the one that ok's the purchase when your card is swiped thru the machine at the merchant, does the grunt work of processing the sales and then debits your account , keeps a proccessing fee and a couple days later credits the merchants account.
There are too many variants of this to get into. Here's the point, the processor has the ability to bring up your entire credit history, even your mother's maiden name, passwords, everything, remember, this is not the issuing bank but a third party. They place people working in the processor or hack the site as happened to choicepoint. The idea is that the front, in this case a music download site just collects cc#'s. That cc#'s entire profile is brought up from these #'s, packaged according to potential value much like mortgages and sold off to highest bidders. They have become very sophisticated. I know of one case where they hacked the Hypercoms, the cc swipe machine, by overnite sofware download, into approving the purchases so the merchant thought it was fine, only the $$ extracted from the bank accounts went into a bank in Dubai, Most small merchants didn't see it till their next statements. The hackers were smart enough to start at beginning of the mo so the game went on for several weeks. BTW, you guys are about as sharp as the back end of a rowboat.
Of course we were smart enough to ask you genius first. But thanks for the info anyway, I figured it out before you answered, if you read the first post, the questions indicate the suspicion. But let's take it a step farer. Let's suppose I want to get other people CC numbers, I could probably find much LESS timeconsuming and cheaper way than putting up a fake musicdowload site with millions of songs, wouldn't you agree??? After all, I have seen FAKE banksites, where the invested time/money was minoscule compared to uploading music....
The #'s of takers can be in the 100's of thousands for a music download site. Probably the largest volume game. Who knows, it could even be legit, the point is you have to be very careful. My bad, I left out the sentence before the sharp statement. It was supposed to read " Compared to the super slicks out there" you guys are.............. My apologies, I didn't mean to insult anynoe. Just remember, this is what these people do and they are good at it. I D fraud is the biggest crime dollar wise in the world now. edit: To fine tune it a bit you would be surprised how many major banks send everything to India overnite to be reconciled and sent back in time for next day biz. Brokers do this too. A whole nother can of worms in terms of exposure.