Okay, I literally just found this.
I did a Google Image Search for “Doctor Octoroc” (I know, how conceited of me?), and this picture came up:
And here is where I found the image: http://felicacy.blogspot.com/2008/04/ipod-nano-loves-3.html.
Feel free to check it out yourself, but I’ll describe it to you.
This is a blogspot.com page which, according to the blogger, is home of the “mother of all bead craft”. There are several blog posts containing images of various Bead Sprites, and within each post is a price…one would assume the blog is for the purpose of selling these crafts.
The particular post containing this image was posted on April 12, 2008…
If you haven’t figured it out yet, that picture of the beaded iPod Nanos was taken by me, made by me, and submitted to DeviantART on February 29, 2008. Also, if you roll over the download link to the left, guess what the name of the image file is? That’s right, “iPods_by_DrOctoroc.jpg”.
Now, what’s the scam, that this blogger took my image from DeviantART (which is under
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License, I might add)? No, I couldn’t care less about the image. It’s actually flattering to me that someone saw my work and thought that it was good enough to use for a scam. Look at the right side panel of the blog. There is no official or protected payment method, just I Banking and POSB Bank Transfer. What the hell are those? It sounds worse than an Escrow Service to me.
This may not be convincing enough, so I attempted to find some more information on this blogger. There were no outgoing links to other profiles or blogs, but I did find one inlink (for those of you that don’t know, you can find websites that link to a URL by typing “link:www.URL-goes-here.com” into a Yahoo search. So, I did this, and found only one site – another blog with the same setup, format and grammatical errors as the one containing my iPod Nanos: http://theice-creamshop.blogspot.com/.
I honestly can’t know for sure what these pages are all about, but it definitely looks shady. There seem to be random comments missing. Also, the fact that there are no inbound or outbound links from the blog, this screams shady. However, I did another inlink search on Yahoo for http://theice-creamshop.blogspot.com/, which returned other blogs such as http://thelittleland.blogspot.com/. This blog links to a ton of other blogs like these, including http://the-fakeshop.blogspot.com/, http://prettyconcept.blogspot.com/, http://the8088shop.blogspot.com/, and many more.
In other words, this may be a huge network of scamming blogs…
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Shady indeed, but spreading the Dr. Octoroc fame of bead sprite it does. Hopefully no sales are actually conducted through this group of scams.
Comment by Marcos 07.25.08 @ 12:24 pmLeave a comment
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