I’m sure you’ve all heard of Warrior Forum. It’s one of the largest internet marketing forums on the web and has been online since 1997. I signed up around 4 and a half years ago however I never posted there as I had a very negative attitude of the community. To me, it seemed like everyone was either a beginner or a more experienced marketer who was ripping off beginners.
As I started browsing the forums more, I realised that my view of the forum wasn’t right. Sure, there are a lot of beginners and a lot of the special offers that are posted (known as WSO’s) which don’t offer a lot of value, however there are thousands of fantastic people who are active there. Good experienced marketers who are trying to help out other marketers.
I think the mistake most beginners make is to spend too much time there. Too much posting on the forum and not enough time actually working on making money. I’ve made a point to only post there when I have a question or when I’ve completed a lot of work that day. That’s stopped me from becoming a member of The People`s Front of Judea (aka the PFJ)!!
Those of you who subscribe to this blog will know that I released a PDF version of my ebook ‘The Traits & Habits of Successful Bloggers‘ for free to newsletter subscribers a few days ago. I decided to announce it on Warrior Forum to increase exposure of this blog and the book and to say thank you to the members that have answered questions for me. The book has been well received.
Aweber sends me a quick email whenever someone joins my newsletter (I like to get regular updates of new subscribers when a list is new). Whilst I normally don’t do much work on Christmas day, I usually do a quick email check. Today I noticed that someone had signed up to my newsletter with the email address [email protected]. As you would expect, this set off alarm bells.
I signed up to BestBlackHatForum.com and I found that they were offering my book as a direct download; completely bypassing the need to sign up to my newsletter. Not only that, they went to the hassle of removing all references to me and Warrior Forum and removed the links back to this blog. Scumbags! All of this to save them from signing up to my newsletter (they must really hate this blog!!!).
The forum actively encourages members to save the file and upload it at other places so that the file is not lost. This means that your file only has to be downloaded once in order for it to spread to other websites and be potentially downloaded thousands of times. Perhaps not a major concern with a product that has been released for free but most of the products listed in their ‘Freebies’ section are premium products that sell for over $100.
The whois for the domain is protected by the DomainsByProxy service so their host’s information is not publicly available. The service is used to protect people`s identity online and stop internet harassment etc. Ironically, the service also promotes that the fact that it can stop data mining. Funny how the owners of a forum which allows hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of illegal downloads every day doesn’t want anyone stealing their private information.
I’ve filed a complaint with them so hopefully they will be supportive in the issue. I suspect this forum gets this type of thing every day though so I’m unsure as to how effective the legal route will be.
Dealing with Scammers
This was the first time that I’ve had a digital product stolen from me (to my knowledge). It’s frustrating to spend so much time working on a product only to see people try and get it for free. For what, so they didn’t have to sign up to my newsletter? It really highlights how lazy some people are as they could have just signed up, downloaded the file and unsubscribed. I suspect that’s too much of an inconvenience for them.
I have had to deal with people stealing my content many times in the past. Every article on my former blog Blogging Tips was published on Splogs (Spam Blogs). I realised early on that I was fighting a losing battle as it took me at least a few minutes to report an offending website to Google and every day more and more websites were being created that were stealing my content (most splogs are monetized using Google Adsense so one thing you can do is report them to Google to try and have their Google Adsense account banned). The best way round it was to add copyright notices inside content and link heavily within my articles so that it was clear to everyone where the original content was from.
Most content producers accept the fact that people will steal their content. Many people believe that having your content stolen is inevitable. I would agree, but I think that inaction can be dangerous, particularly if your product is expensive. That particular black hat forum lists plugins, themes and other digital products that sell for hundreds of dollars each. Perhaps these are people that would never buy your product anyway so you’ve not really lost anything hoever I’m positive that there are people who will purchase a product if they can’t get it illegally. Most of the popular products that are listed there (illegally) have hundreds of downloads so even if only a small percentage of those people would download your product, you’re still losing hundreds if not thousands of dollars.
It’s not a major concern for me at the moment though should I launch a premium digital product in 2013, I’ll take all the steps necessary to stop people from ripping me off. It’s a difficult thing to balance though as you don’t want to frustrate the people who did actually pay for your product.
Warning Others About This Problem
It’s always been in my nature to warn others about scammers so that other people don’t get ripped off. As such, I wrote a long detailed thread about the issue on Warrior Forum today to highlight the problem to other members. This, after all, is an issue that effects most members there. A quick check on the black hat forum showed close to 5 thousand Warrior Forum Special Offers that have been copied and illegally uploaded for others to download for free.
Unfortunately, the staff at Warrior Forum don’t share my enthusiasm for highlighting problems like this. A few minutes after I posted my thread, it was deleted.
I wasn’t shocked by this however I was a little disappointed. Thankfully, I’m a man who plans ahead and made a copy of it beforehand (which I normally do with long forum posts in case the browser crashes). Have a look at what I wrote to understand my view on the issue a little better.
————Start of My Message on Warrior Forum———————————-
A Warning to All Warrior Forum Members About BestBlackHatForum.com
Sorry to post this on Christmas day but I wanted to warn other Warrior Forum members about an issue that concerns all of you. Specifically those who are releasing digital products.
I posted my first WSO the other day. It’s a free ebook about successful bloggers that I am giving away to newsletter subscribers for free.
Unfortunately, the book has been shared at BestBlackHatForum.com. Not only did the scumbags directly link to the download file, they also removed all references to me, Warrior Forum and my blog (they replaced ‘The members of Warrior Forum have been really helpful to me’ with ‘The members of BestBlackHatForum have been really helpful to me’).
The email that was used to sign up was [email protected]. I have contacted Aweber about the situation and asked them to ban the email address from all accounts.
Their domain is protected by DomainsByProxy. I have filed a claim with them and asked for their contact details and I will be looking at starting legal proceedings against them.
Is this a heavy handed response against someone stealing an ebook? In my opinion, no. I will be releasing many more digital products in 2013. Some of these will take me months to produce and I will be charging a fee for them. This kind of thing could potentially cost me tens of thousands of dollars in lost sales every year.
Whilst I am lucky in some respects that my file has been released for free to my newsletter subscribers, most of the so called ‘freebies’ on the forum are premium products. You may think I’m getting free exposure etc, but this isn’t the kind of exposure I want. The ebook is offered to my subscribers for free but it’s a premium product that is being sold on Amazon and other book stores for a fee. However, I suppose it’s actually a good thing that they didn’t sign up to my newsletter as I don’t want pirates on my list
How does this effect Warrior Forum Members?
This is a really big issue for those of us who want to release products on Warrior Forum because:
- They are actively crawling this forum for products. This means that this has happened in the past and will happen again.
- They are actively encouraging others to download the file and upload to other locations so that the file isn’t lost.
It’s worrying that the members of the forum are encouraged to upload and share other places. This means that all they need is one person to buy a product and even if you change the download location it could be downloaded by others thousands of times; whether your product is free, $10 or $100.
After searching their freebies second for a minute, I quickly found the following WSO’s are being offer there for free:
- [Guaranteed 100% UNIQUE] Get BIG Offline Cash NOW With This PROVEN BAD-ASS Lead Generation Method! by Andrew M
- Boomerang WP Review Theme – Unlimited Awesome Theme with Facebook and Autoresponder Integration by Johan Efendi
- FB Fahrenheit by James Renouf
- [WARRIORS AMAZED!]Discover How I EFFORTLESSLY Get over 1k Buyers on my list DAILY!!(Newbie Friendly) by aroth
I searched for WarriorForum.com within the freebies forum room. The result was frightening – 189 pages. There are 25 threads listed per page which means that approximately 4,725 products have been stolen from WarriorForum members.
This is something that effects all of us. It’s going to cost those of us who release WSO’s thousands of dollars. As a result, this will hurt affiliates money. It could discourage other marketers from promoting good offers here altogether.
What’s bizarre is that the forum has it’s own special offers section where marketers can sell their products. Why would anyone try to sell something to a community where everyone rips other people off???
What can you do
To all of you who offer WSO’s, ebooks and other digital products, I encourage you to sign up to their forum (using a fake email!) and check whether your product has been downloaded. If it has, please visit DomainsByProxy and click on the ‘File a Claim’ button at the bottom of the page.
I am going to keep checking the forum on a regular basis and report any illegal files stolen from Warrior Members and other affiliate marketers. I encourage you all to do the same and share any other information with all of us as this will help us stop these idiots.
We need to work together to stop this forum (and others like it). I hope the owners of Warrior Forum can also help with this situation too as in the long term it’s going to do a lot of damage to Warrior Forum.
Thanks,
Kevin
————–End of My Message on Warrior Forum——————————–
Having a thread deleted is always frustrating, particularly when you only set out to warm others about a serious problem. You would think the owners of Warrior Forum would want members to be proactive about things like this. Sadly, it doesn’t seem they do.
I also think it’s pretty weak for forum moderators to delete threads and posts without even taking the time to explain why to members. I understand why they don’t do this with spammers and I know Warrior Forum is very popular and probably needs a lot of moderation; however posts from good members should be given the benefit of doubt. At the very least they deserve a quick message explaining their reasons for deleting it. On my forums I try not and heavily moderate members in this fashion as it’s destructive and can lead to good members leaving (inaction can have the same effect).
The Danger of Forum Owners Not Protecting Their Members
Forum owners should do everything they can to protect their members. This is particularly true within the website trading and internet marketing niche. Unfortunately, many forum owners not only fail to do so, they also take steps to stop others who are trying to protect others.
It’s happened to me before. About ten or eleven years ago I was pretty active in the domaining community DNForum (I believe I have 1,500+ posts there). I sold a lot of domains and websites there. With one particular website sale the buyer asked beforehand if he could only purchase the database as he only wanted the data and didn’t need the domain, website and theme. It wasn’t an uncommon request so I didn’t think I would have any problems with him.
After he agreed to buy the full website, we arranged payment via Paypal; which is what I used for most sales under $1,000 at the time. I don’t recall the exact value of the sale though it was probably around $400-$800.
For over ten years I’ve been an eNom reseller through my website 815Domains. He didn’t have an eNom account so after he paid I created an account for him and pushed the domain to the sub-account. I also gave him hosting details for the site. Unfortunately, the guy was a scumbag. After he received the domain and all website files he reversed the payment through PayPal. To add insult to injury he then messaged me laughing about it, trying to twist the knife in after his little scheme succeeded. PayPal offer sellers no protection in this kind of service. You’ll rarely win any case with them as they always take the buyer’s side. It’s why you should never use PayPal for large purchases; always go with Escrow.com instead.
Thankfully, this story has a happy ending. The buyer hadn’t moved the domain from the sub-account so I was able to login and push the domain back to my account. He had wreaked havoc on the database after he downloaded it so that I couldn’t use it but my host was able to roll back everything so in the end, whilst the buyer did get the data from the database, I still owned the website and I was able to sell it at a later date.
As I mentioned previously in this post, I have always been quick to warn others whenever I encounter a scammer. So when all of this happened, I wrote a very long detailed post on DNForum explaining what happened and warning others not to deal with the guy. I wasn’t looking for a pat on the back, I just didn’t want this guy to rip anyone else off.
Sadly, DNForum deleted my thread. Just like Warrior Forum, I was not told why it was deleted. One minute it was there, next minute it was gone. I’m sorry to say that particular member went on to rip off at least 2 or 3 other DNForum members before he as eventually banned. These people lost a lot of money because of stupid rules and guidelines that had been set up. Rules which are policed by moderators who can’t see the bigger picture.
The whole thing is baffling to me. It really is. A forum is only as good as its members. Without them, the forum is nothing. Therefore it’s vital that you look after them. Even if you didn’t depend on them, why wouldn’t your natural instinct not to be to protect others from being conned? What is the basis for deleting threads that warn others about known scammers?
I truly hope that forums would be more proactive in protecting members. Piracy is always going to be a problem in a digital world, whether it’s content, books, photos, software or movies. I don’t think content creators like myself will ever stop them and I’m not sure how much time we should spend chasing them for stealing our products either. Perhaps authors should be flattered that someone is stealing their content and be grateful of the exposure.
This issue doesn’t effect me a great day at the moment but it will in the future therefore I hope that forums allow members to warn others of websites that do rip us off. They should be looking out for members wherever they can. At the very least, they should explain their reasoning behind why we can’t help warn others.
Thanks for reading my happy Christmas message :)
Kevin
Illegal downloads are always going to be around, though forums such as black hat forums certainly encourage it and make the problem worse.
I just find it all so very sad that we have come to a point where all this theft is rife when people are working really hard to provide something of value. I hope I can protect my members on my forums or at least alert them to the possibility of their works being stolen like this.
here is a darn good example of how sites are purposely setting up to give away stolen goods.. (I guess for a reason to drive traffic and then to collect email addresses too … who knows)
this link is a yahoo question… https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100605082034AAKMU2c scroll down to see the spam announcement about getting free WSO products ( about half way)
SAD
It is an interesting way to look at it Rich. I am perhaps a bit skeptical as to whether people are actually downloading products worth $300 as a trial…particularly as many products in that price range offer trials. When I saw my own book being offered there, I saw dozens of threads with people sharing tips on how to download products illegally. There was a disregard to whether the developer lost a huge amount of money (even when it was a single developer who was trying to support his family).
I do agree that piracy is not going away. I believe companies should try and move towards business models that are based on support etc. Unfortunately, some products cannot be monetised in that way.
People forget that time, energy and expertise that goes into developing products. Several hundred files of coding can take years to develop, therefore I can understand why software companies put in measures to stop piracy. Very few top software companies accommodate piracy. There’s a reason why Microsoft aggressively take measures to stop illegal downloaders.
Interesting topic and all good points but dont think its such a black and white answer and like all marketing strategies takes some creativity and knowing the market. I understand that best black hat forum offers free products and allows theft on the most basic level but it also has a few benefits. It is a great place to find the latest offers easily and quickly and with so much crap going around on WF, WSO etc that it allows you a trial before purchasing. The general tone of the forum is if you download a program for free (steal) and it makes you money, support the products creator. The problem is that there are so many cowboys throwing out vague, useless info products or software thats incomplete or terrible after sales that buying a product is part gamble..
I have seen on some posts where the product creator jumps in midway through the discussion and offers a discounted rate with most people happy to pay for the product, especially with a 20% discount so everyone benefits. The days of piracy are in full flight so accept it and don’t underestimate its audience. Yes its not right but frankly there is bugger all you can really do about it. Next time your product is being downloaded for free jump into the discussion, introduce yourself. your product or blog and ask nicely if they can change the link to your landing page so you can still build the list as intended. If you offer something of value why would they not want to sign up and receive more products (free and paid) from you. Piracy is here to stay so implement excellent security or get creative and treat it as another traffic source.
Wow. $5,000 a day is crazy. That’s the reason some affiliate marketing guys are making over $100,000 a year through 1% cashback schemes on their credit cards.
Great talking to you too. It’s good to hear that, in the end, the spammers were not able to hurt your business. :)
Kevin
Yes my friend,
I totally agree with you. Like many of my customers tell me, If the product fits, the price is never an issue. Plus most (My PPC Customers) of them are spending on average around $5000 per day on PPC and I am pretty sure they are making a profit on that.
Great ‘talking’ to you.
Good luck
Nitin
These black hat guys are hilarious. They would rather spend hours or even days trying to get software for free instead of just buying it for $97 and getting back to work. It is that kind of attitude that ensures that they will always be bottom feeders.
It sounds like they spent a lot of time trying to crack your software. Why didn’t they just spend that time working on something tangible and then just buy it legitimately?
2-5 sales per day is great. :)
Hi Kevin,
I was also thinking the same thing that WF must have something to do with the Blackhat forum. In fact one would think that WF would do all it can to get that site de-listed or something.
The initial version of my PPC product got posted on the blackhat but then I built in an online activation in future releases that have not been broken (yet!). This PPC product sells for $97 and is now not selling as well as it did. But I also white labeled this same product with a great PPC marketer and that one is selling really well!
The ebook product is by far my best product and these days I focus on that product mostly. This ebook product was also being discussed on the Blackhat forum.
Some guy was asking if they can do group Buy of my ebook product on the blackhat.
Then another guy replied saying that it will not work because it ‘calls home’ to activate.
Then the first guys asked – can we crack it using a sniffer tool?
The reply was “don’t bother it’s all encrypted!!”
That was sweet redemption for me.
I always try to see things in a positive manner. So in a way i did (in my mind) was thankful that my software got ‘stolen’ because it made me build better protection and make more sales in the end.
I have now sold over 3000 copies of this ebook product and I get on average 2-5 sales per day.
Not enough to quit my day job though!!
Hi Nitin,
I’m sorry to hear that you experienced the same problems I did. It still surprises me that more WSO sellers are not angry about this. There is a certain irony that Warrior Forum depends on selling WSO’s in order to make money, yet they do nothing to protect sellers. In fact, they go out of their way to ban them. Who knows – maybe they partly own the blackhat forum. It wouldn’t surprise me.
Like you, I had paid to sell WSO’s on Warrior Forum. This money was not refunded after they deleted my thread about it being stolen.
I think the saddest thing about all of this is that this still happens every single day. Every day products are being sold on Warrior Forum and every day they are being posted on the blackhat forum. And the owners of Warrior Forum are doing nothing about this.
Your eBook software looks great. Best of luck with the project. How have sales been recently?
Kevin
Hi Kevin,
One of my customers sent me a link to your article which i read with intereset!
I totally agree with all you said. I also have a similar story that I would like to share with you and your readers…
You see I am a software developer and have create a number of tools for the IM market. In particular one of my best selling tool for building PPC campaigns was a big success. Because I was a member of the Warrior forum I offered it as a WSO for about $9.99. I sold many in like 7 days because back in 2007, PPC was still very lucrative and many IMers were buying PPC traffic. I then increased the price to around $37 after adding a ton more features.
Then one day in 2008 – a year after it’s initail launch, I get this email from one of my customers. He told me that my tool was being offered for free on that backhat forum. I did a quick google search for my tool and there it was on page 1 of google in the blackhat forum.
Like yourself I joined the forum and posted a couple of messages on that thread that was offering free downloads of my tool. I wrote that I was the developer and that you are stealing my software. A got a reply from one of the members to suck it up and stop crying and blamed me for not protecting my software.
I even wrote to the rapid share site that was hosting my files and I saw that there was over 7000 downloads. I felt sick to my stomach just to think I could have quit my job had these all been my sales! RapidShare eventually took the file off – but the file was back up in just one day!
I also did what you did on the warrior forum and wrote a thread just to warn other WSO creators! Guess what – THEY BANNED ME! And removed all my WSOs and threads! Zero reason was offered. I could not believe it. I even paid $39 for the War Room for a 20 year or so membership.
Since then I have built in protection into my products so no one can steal them.
I don’t even go to the WF just to read threads or whatever. Like you said, if one spends more time
doing instead of reading WF threads one would be more successful!
I agree. I read a long article from a musician the other day that said that music is strongly undervalued now because a generation has grown up thinking it is ok to just copy music. The same thing could happen with the books. If that happens, authors will move on to other things and those that stay will need to think of other ways to make money through their work.
It seems the web has a way of devaluing digital products i.e. they will end up being sold for the lowest price possible.(Or in this instance being stolen and given away). If you look on many of the micro jobbing sites you will find products worth $100’s being sold for $5.Also, I wonder how many people signed up to the Blackhat forum after reading about it?
It’s a shame they removed the posts. Warrior Forum are very heavy handed with many things on the forum. Delete first, think later. It can be very frustrating.
I’m surprised Spencer did not respond himself (though I haven’t seen the thread myself to verify this).
Good to meet another information junkie :)
Kevin
PayPal doesn’t offers sellers much protection either, particularly with digital products and services. Unfortunately, it’s the de-facto payment processor for so many websites.
Thanks for posting. While I am not a seller and have nothing to offer in WSO forms, I am an info junkie spending more dollars a week than I ever care to admit too in WSO, dime sales, etc. I ran across an ad the other day for Long Tail Pro and pointed out the bad ad – 75% off for 7 days. Seems simple enough except they forgot to say in their ad that it was a dime sale whereby the price increased making the ad NOT 75% off for 7 days. Several people pointed it out and all these post were removed. Spencer finally came in and somewhat fixed the ad and gave a pitiful excuse which shocked me coming from him. Guess he really needed the money. However I was even more surprised by the responses I received from gurus that I respect in the marketplace… if the product is good buy it anyway was the responses, at least for the 4 out of 10 that bothered to respond. And Spencer, for the record, did not respond.
We all have a tough time building our products, building our websites, building our brand… no need for deletion or price rigging because then we all lose in the end.
Very interesting post Kevin, it’s a shame that your forum post got deleted, I can’t see the sense in that. Thanks for warning about Paypal sales, I wasn’t aware it was so easy for buyers to do such things.
That’s very true. The people that are ripping you off are probably not going to benefit from it anyways. You should see that black hat forum though. I’m surprised it hasn’t been shut down yet as it has millions of dollars worth of illegal products listed.
I think there are some good members at WF. There’s a lot of people making good money there too. I’ve no problem with the vast majority of active members being active. It’s just a shame that people go there specifically to steal products and upload them elsewhere.
Happy Christmas Kevin,
Sorry to hear about all this trouble. TWF is a hive of scammers, with only a few redeeming features.
I have been a member for about five years, and have maybe posted a dozen times to help those struggling in areas that I am familiar with – and those people have more often than not been thankful for my help.
BUT, unfortunately many of the active posts on TWF discuss traffic cheats, SEO cheats, and scamming techniques rather than concentrate on building a website that is worthwhile, and potentially far more profitable in the long-run.
It will be interesting to hear what your other readers think!