MicrostockGroup

So how is someone selling bundles of credits at less than half the US price? Credit card theft? Stolen from employer? Corrupt insider? I didn't even know they could be transferred to a third party.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=2056598

This seems to be on an entirely different scale, the guy's offering thousands of the things and is geared up as a business.

And he's been doing it since January (!!??!!)

Is this common practice at other agencies as well that "credit resellers" infiltrate forums to blow out discounted credit packages?

This looks really weird to me. I wonder if Fotolia really authorizes/condones selling schemes like this one.

Did anyone already contact Fotolia about this?

The seller was asked about expiration dates, which he said was 2 years from the transfer, but I'd have thought it was 2 years from the purchase date - the original purchase date. Given the seller has been offering these deals for months and one poster claimed he'd gone back for more credits, this can't have been one bulk purchase that was being sold off over time. If that were the case, there'd be less and less time remaining on these credits.

If it isn't some scummy employee taking credits he payed nothing for, I can't see how you can sell for less than half price and make any money on the deal.

I guess as FT has payments to contributors at a fixed rate, not at a percentage of whatever the buyer paid, this is a scam that doesn't directly hurt the people whose images were purchased unless FT voids all the sales.

I don't remember seeing anything quite like this before in the various scams that have come up. I guess the criminal mind is ever inventive

I couldn't ever figure out how the credit card fraudists on iStock were making money or what their motivation really was, surely there is a better way to get money from a credit card than buy iStock images... but perhaps this is a credit card fraud, it makes a little more sense.

Seems to me that FT exclusive gold members and above could profitably buy credits from this vendor in USD and use them all buying their own images at a profit especially when registered on a FT Euro site. This is the stock equivalent of the perpetual motion machine.

Start at gold with 4% profit. Quickly rise to  diamond for 13% profit on every file sold to yourself!