Thanks for posting Scott.  I am glad you guys are aware and working on this.  I've had over $180 worth of fraudulent sales in the past 24 hours. 

I see that the fraudulent charges have been deducted from my account, but as it appears I have been heavily targeted by these thieves, I would like to know what is being done to protect my intellectual property? 

+1 (the only difference is a smaller number than Lisa!  )

Yeah, same here. all $2 sales yesterday and today have been reversed. Guess I'll wait to log sales for a bit.

Just noticed that the last fraudulent charge appears to have been made at 5:14 am.  The charges after that are normal size and not reversed.  Hopefully that means that whatever BigStock is doing managed to put a stop to it?

They got me, too.

I noticed that all of my DLs were all random and all about 5 years old.

Quote from: scottbraut on December 31, 2010, 17:45
Pixart - I'm not 100% sure what you're seeing, but we can look into it.  Please reach out directly to the support email address and they'll look into anything that you can't explain.
http://www.bigstockphoto.com/contactus.html

That was me overreacting in a way - but now I see now that it's the money put "on hold" for new sales causing confusion (I get pretty uptight when by balance diminishes!).  For illustation - say yesterday I had $50 with nothing on hold and I could cash out.  Today I had $11 in bogus sales, and they are put "on hold" anyway.  Then the $11 is reversed from my account.   That balances out the bogus sales on your side - but the $11 bogus sales are still "on hold" so the account balance is $39 when it should really be $50 and no cash out is possible until the $11 clears. 

Noone will be surprised if you suspend cashouts for the moment anyway so it should all wash out when the "hold" clears the account - what is that - 7 days? 

I hope that makes some kind of sense to you.  Happy New Year everyone.

My last fraudulent one was just after 5am, same as Lisa, and the first one was three or four hours earlier, so it looks like they plugged the latest leak in a matter of hours.

Quote from: Pixart on December 31, 2010, 21:00

That was me overreacting in a way - but now I see now that it's the money put "on hold" for new sales causing confusion (I get pretty uptight when by balance diminishes!).  For illustation - say yesterday I had $50 with nothing on hold and I could cash out.  Today I had $11 in bogus sales, and they are put "on hold" anyway.  Then the $11 is reversed from my account.   That balances out the bogus sales on your side - but the $11 bogus sales are still "on hold" so the account balance is $39 when it should really be $50 and no cash out is possible until the $11 clears. 

I see I have a negative $73 balance.  That makes no sense to me.  They have already deducted the $170+ of bad charges, but why is the remaining $73 showing as a negative balance? 

I agree with Pixart - I am willing to wait for a cash out until this is all straightened out - but I am concerned when I see proceeds from legitimate sales showing as a negative balance...

Hello All,

In response to some of the earlier inquiries - unfortunately, we can't give specifics or details about security procedures.  We do have a large number of existing security checks in place and (like other e-commerce sites) we aggressively monitor and adjust them on an active basis to prevent fraud.   As you know from recent issues at iStock, fraudsters work hard to mimic legitimate customer behavior and these attempts seem to have spiked this week.    

Many of our existing prevention methods have already been successful, but we are putting increasingly restrictive controls and review procedures in place.  Our staff has been actively working through the holidays (and continues to do so) to ensure a safe selling and buying experience.

In response to negative balances - I'm going to speak with the team and we'll get that straightened out.  As mentioned earlier, please forward any details to the [email protected] e-mail address, since that will create a ticket for the team to track with details.

Best Regards,

Scott

And, to continue with Lisa's question, what happens about images already downloaded?  Are they being used for FREE in violation of author's copyright?

Hi Warren,

Since fraudulent downloads aren't uses, the most accurate response would be to say that we track and pursue copyright violations and work hard to prevent and identify fraudsters.  How we do that varies by situation once we locate the infringing use or the individual in question.

Best,

Scott

Quote from: WarrenPrice on December 31, 2010, 15:59
Nothing for me.  You know your portfolio is really bad when even fraudulent buyers don't want your stuff.   

Are we related?

I did have a $2 sale in Oct. It's about time for one more for the year? I'm still on the track to cash out and close my account, sometime in 2012 if I live that long.

Quote from: RacePhoto on December 31, 2010, 22:48

Quote from: WarrenPrice on December 31, 2010, 15:59
Nothing for me.  You know your portfolio is really bad when even fraudulent buyers don't want your stuff.   

Are we related?

I did have a $2 sale in Oct. It's about time for one more for the year? I'm still on the track to cash out and close my account, sometime in 2012 if I live that long.

Actually, Race, i've had a decent 2010 at BigStock -- a payout and closing in on another.  It is slow.  I am learning that images need at least 8 months online to start selling.  I don't know if it has to do with search engine programming or just coincidence?  I've had several $2 & $3 sales ... legitimate ones.   
Here's to a Happy New Year for them and Us.   

PS:  My most exciting site is still Cutcaster.  Not many sales but when they make a sale ... it's a payout.   

@Scott ... Thanks for the explanation, Scott.  Hope you capture the Creeps.

Quote from: scottbraut on December 31, 2010, 22:15
Hello All,

In response to some of the earlier inquiries - unfortunately, we can't give specifics or details about security procedures.  We do have a large number of existing security checks in place and (like other e-commerce sites) we aggressively monitor and adjust them on an active basis to prevent fraud.   As you know from recent issues at iStock, fraudsters work hard to mimic legitimate customer behavior and these attempts seem to have spiked this week.    

Many of our existing prevention methods have already been successful, but we are putting increasingly restrictive controls and review procedures in place.  Our staff has been actively working through the holidays (and continues to do so) to ensure a safe selling and buying experience.

In response to negative balances - I'm going to speak with the team and we'll get that straightened out.  As mentioned earlier, please forward any details to the [email protected] e-mail address, since that will create a ticket for the team to track with details.

Best Regards,

Scott

Understand, thanks for responding here!

Quote from: Blufish on December 31, 2010, 18:50
Bigstock, you earn bonus points for being forthright and honest, as well as how quickly you are addressing the issues. Other companies should take note of your professionalism

wow.. amen to this!  I'm impressed.. Need to add BigStock to my list of sites to begin contributing to.

I had five sales today that are all invalid transactions. I am glad BigStock was there to get a handle on it immediately. I really appreciate that. I am a little concerned, too, about the images being stolen. I hope the thieves can be tracked down and prosecuted.

Hello,

OK - the negative "payable" balances have been corrected.  **There wasn't an issue with the underlying data for your commissions.**  What happened is that that today's reversed download transactions were being included in the amount shown for the "non-payable" holding period as it appears in the interface. That made the math somewhat confusing if you checked your "payable" commission balance in Your Account.

We corrected that interface issue and now everything should look right.  Again, the underlying commissions that were payable were fine.  As always, please report if you see any discrepancies or issues to Customer Service at [email protected].

Thanks!  

Scott

Just want to add my note of appreciation to the list, Scott.  Thanks so much for the timely and informative posts, and thanks to the team at BigStock for their hard work in addressing this issue.  It's very reassuring.  Much respect, and happy new year to all at BigStock. 

Sorry Scott the issue is still not corrected. 

The commission page now display the correct amount payable, but when I requested a payment the confirmation page reverted back to the incorrect amount. In my case the amount payable was listed as $72 (this is the correct amount), but after I requested payment the confirmation page stated "You will receive a nett payment of from Bigstock of $57".  This is the incorrect amount previously displayed as "Total payable" before it was corrected. 

OK, the numbers look correct in your account (i.e., they add up to the right amount), but having not gone through the sequence - I'm not sure what you saw.  You're saying you had a total payable amount of $72, but your payout request only let you request $57, leaving $15 still payable?
 
I'll send this to the dev team to start them looking at it, but as stated (sorry to be a broken record) - individual issues are best sent to Support so they can reply in a single thread and track it. 

Best,

Scott

Thank you Scott. I will send another mail to support. I did send a query to support yesterday (regarding the original discrepancy on the commission page) but did not receive a reply yet.

I am a little concerned over the fact that although the credit card fraud has been detected, stopped, and our accounts were adjusted immediately, the person downloading STILL got my images. If this person didn't have any moral issues using the stolen credit card to make the purchases, I don't believe they are going to have any problems giving my images away or even reselling them and grabbing the money.

What I don't want to see is a blanket statement, such as has already been issued, that copyright infringement is taken seriously, but we never hear anything again about what has actually been done to prosecute the person who stole the images.

292,000 images had copyright information removed and replaced from them, via BigStock, Media Bakery, Colossus and Pixmac. The images were pulled down, but AFTER the damage had already been done. I haven't heard a single word about what the agency(ies) have done to prosecute the person responsible for changing our copyright information to that of Colossus. That whole issue just disappeared into thin air. Nobody knows nothing and nobody was at fault.

I expect to be compensated for the fact that a few of my best selling images have now been stolen. Multiply that by how many images overall have gotten stolen this past couple of weeks and we aren't talking chump change anymore.

Back room deals with only the big suppliers isn't good enough. Each and every contributor affected should expect to receive compensation for what has been stolen from them.

Same thing here. Many of my best sellers have been downloaded in full resolution and the royalties have been deducted again for 3 days in a row now.

As I mentioned before, every agency makes claims of aggressively pursuing copyright infringements but in the end we the contributors never hear back whether such pursuit was successful or not.

I'm absolutely fine that the agency deserves to be compensated for their efforts in cases they recover any damages but I'm sure that a 1% or 2% split of that would cover the original licensing fee that the contributor could still receive.

Since we all can only speculate what's happening behind the scenes (and none of them will tell you what's actually happening), we'll be left with stale promises and just hope "for the best".

What a pisser. Over 60 of my images (many of them my best sellers) have been ripped off in this round of fraud. As it stands right now, I have no idea what my true earnings were for December, and when I try to request a payout, it says that I have an insufficient account balance to do so. I know that's not correct, so I hope this gets resolved soon.

Quote from: Norebbo on January 01, 2011, 18:53
What a pisser. Over 60 of my images (many of them my best sellers) have been ripped off in this round of fraud. As it stands right now, I have no idea what my true earnings were for December, and when I try to request a payout, it says that I have an insufficient account balance to do so. I know that's not correct, so I hope this gets resolved soon.

And apparently it's still going on, another 6 today downloaded then refeunded..............