Please tell me a rich guy just bought a hundred articles...

[geniuswaitress]

...Because otherwise I'm HUGELY skeptical about these purchases. $75 -$200 is a lot to pay for usage rights , especially when you're buying a slew of other things too.

Plus, you'd think if somebody had that kind of money to sling around, they'd spring for full rights.

Call me paranoid, but...

[audrabianca]

Yeah I was a little skeptical myself. I had over 20 of my articles sold today. Let's keep our fingers crossed this isn't a situation of stolen licenses.

[Celeste Stewart]

I'm betting it's a moderately rich guy. If you look through the premium content section, you'll see a bunch of premium articles were nabbed (plus many non-premium) but also quite a few were skipped. If the credit card were stolen, the guy would have purchased some of those $250+ articles yet those remain untouched. Imagine a publisher putting together a new magazine or a series of ezines for clients - the premium section is a great place to go for content because the articles there have already received an editor's recommendation. If the content were for print or ezines, then usage would be the logical license type unless the customer wanted to edit the articles or remove bylines. We're all a little gun shy after the last round of fraud, but I'm hopeful that we have a legitimate new customer who loves our work! :)

[geniuswaitress]

Well, they certainly made their decisions quickly, buying content from many different categories in just a few minutes.

They bought usage rights for as high as $200. While that certainly could happen, it seems odd. Even a little shopping around would yield some bargains.

As before, I hope I'm wrong.

[Celeste Stewart]

It could have taken hours or even days to enter them into the shopping cart and then minutes to purchase. We'll know if its fraudulent soon enough... I hope you're wrong too.

[audrabianca]

I am still shocked. This buyer bought 35 of my articles today... I hope you're wrong too.

[Celeste Stewart]

It does make you pause because it's so unusual. I only had three sold, so it didn't seem too out of the ordinary to me but 35 at once would be a bit jarring. Kind of a "pinch me/am I dreaming" moment. I hope it's legit but don't spend it just yet (just in case).

[BarryDavidson]

The usual period is three days, if I'm not mistaken, to find out if the sale went through and is final. Now, if it is a bogus, buying that many at once should have set off the fraud alarms unless the person who owned it called the company before and raised the limit before the account locks. Mine will lock at around three-hundred fifty (on one purchase) even if I have several thousand left on the card.

I'm happy for all of you who made multiple sales. I'll keep my fingers crossed with you.

Ironically, I'm usually the gloom and doom type, but I spent the weekend at the new house we bought. I can't begin to tell you how relaxing it is to sit on your porch, look out at the trees, and listening to the wind pass through the leaves. In fifteen minutes of sitting there in relative silence, I had ideas for quite a few articles. Now all I need is the two internet connections I ordered to be hooked up there and everything will be right with the world.

[geniuswaitress]

That's awesome Barry.

Maybe the reason I'm more skeptical is simply because I spent my day cleaning up cat vomit, wondering if the AC is broken, and listening to the crazy lady next door scream at her dog.

[Lor]

Good luck, Audra. Did this happen on Sunday? Sundays are the usual days for weird stuff. Hope it's legit. If so, congratulations.

On another note. I wish we could see more than one page of the recently solds. Not just for the curiosity (I was away yesterday and missed the excitmet :), but for a good view of the hot subjects?

Lor

[jrichards]

I have bad news. We just got word from Paypal that the large set of orders that were purchased on Sunday were fraudulent. I know this is really disappointing. It is for us too.

This is going to spur us to look into a relationship with A-Certified which does fraud detection beyond the fraud protection that Paypal already does. The fraud was committed by someone who had phished a Paypal address from some unsuspecting user, so we only got word from Paypal because the person whose account was compromised noticed the large withdrawal, and alerted Paypal. (for some more about phishing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing)

As it turns out these orders occurred at the same time that we were making the payments for the month of April, so of the 5 fraudulent orders 4 of them were made directly before we made the payments and one was made directly after we made the payments. This means that the authors have already been paid for a number of the fraudulently purchased articles. So from our perspective it is going to be impossible for us to collect that money as it has already been sent out. So these orders will remain paid.

The final order #13148 (the one where payments have not yet been made, was a big one, $905 and I have to apologies in advance to audrabianca as this order was largely made up of her articles, but we're going to be refunding this order and returning these articles to the pool of articles for sale.

In spite of already have tightened the security on the site significantly over the past 4 months, we obviously still have some work to do to make the constant-content ship immune to fraud by phished credentials.

If you have any questions, please send them to me at support@constant-content.com.

[jrichards]

Just a little further note. I went through the articles in the order that was refunded and I've made sure that they're all back in the catalog with the full rights available (where the full rights were offered in the first place).

That said if you do find any problems with any of the articles in this batch please let me know via support@constant-content.com

[Celeste Stewart]

Oh drat! I haven't been paid for April yet Jeff, so please feel free to recover the money out of my account for any of my articles that were involved. I believe that I have three sales under orders #13145 and 13146 that are most likely part of this scam. Thanks for letting us know.

[HayleyWriter]

Ouch! That is so nasty. I really hope you can do something about the fraudulent sales. It's hard that CC has to wear the cost of someone else doing something criminal like stealing. It's bad for everyone. Thanks for letting us know the situation on the forums, it makes it easier to know the Support crew are doing everything possible to fix the situation. I was personally lucky, I don't think I got hit in those batches of articles, but I am still upset that it happened for everyone else. It's bad for the writers, and for CC, who now has to wear the costs of these sales that have already been paid to authors.

Hayley

[BarryDavidson]

I really hate to say this, but you may have to eventually set up the site so that customers won't be able to download the articles until the payments have cleared and a 36 to 72 hour waiting period has elapsed so that people can be notified (in the cases of fraud).

It would be better not to have to do this because as a customer I'd want what I paid for immediately. You could require customers to verify all payment methods ahead of time like Paypal and other sites do. They register a credit card or checking account, CC charges a dollar or two, and they have to input an activation code from their monthly statements. This would allow Paypal users to have more time to look at their online activity, and hopefully allow Paypal itself to log where the person using an account fraudulently is accessing the account from. It's not perfect, but it's not as bad as the first option.